


Wolfsbane

by KairosImprimatur



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Airplanes, Bars and Pubs, Cleveland, Cleveland Hellmouth, Compulsion, Demonic Possession, F/M, Fireworks, Fourth of July, Geometry, Murder Mystery, Pack Dynamics, Pilots, Slayer Scythe, Summer, Vampire Slayer(s), Werewolf Politics, Werewolves, Wolfram & Hart, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-09-30 18:30:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10169186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KairosImprimatur/pseuds/KairosImprimatur
Summary: Buffy and Angel are called to the Cleveland Hellmouth to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. The local werewolves, Oz included, have been suspected - but the truth is a greater evil than any of them have encountered since the Battle of Los Angeles.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oh man how long has it been since I showed my face around here? I haven't been idle, but this thing here is an enormous beast and not the sort that I wanted to post chapter by chapter. 
> 
> If you read Buffyverse fanfiction, I sincerely hope you enjoy this and would love to hear any feedback on it, good or bad. I should also note that it ties into many of my other stories, and though I haven't set them all up as a series yet, check the notes at the end for where to find specific details that I used from earlier works.
> 
> Special thanks to @Taaroko for not only coming up with a central plot device, but doing the math to make it work. (Not a metaphor. She did math for me. THIS IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP.)

Buffy ran, alone but for the wild grey wolf always one stride ahead of her. It never slowed, but it never moved quickly enough to lose her, though she thought it could have with ease. Maybe it didn't fear being caught. Maybe it wasn't running from her, but leading her.

They passed through the Hyperion, entering and leaving her own quarters without touching stairs or an elevator, despite the suite being located on the fourth floor. Next it was her old apartment in New York, then Rome. The wolf didn't look back as it bounded into an unfamiliar wood, and Buffy didn't hesitate to follow, even when the forest opened up into an airport and fireworks exploded overhead.

In another few strides, they were inside the Sunnydale High library. Faith and Spike were sitting at the table, looking through a leather-bound tome together and laughing peaceably. The wolf finally came to a halt and turned around to face Buffy, and she saw its eyes for the first time, solid blood red.

Faith looked up from the book and said to Buffy, "Toxoplasma," and Spike nodded and agreed, "Toxoplasma."

The library was suddenly filled with people - all strangers, she thought, until a short man browsing the stacks turned around and grinned at her. The wolf raised its muzzle to the sky, making Buffy aware that there was no ceiling. As a deafening howl filled the air, she looked up at the moon and saw it change from a crescent to a perfect circle.

Everyone in the room except for Spike and Faith began to transform, fur sprouting, ears turning pointed, voices joining the first wolf's howl. Buffy looked at her own hands, but before she could determine if it was happening to her too, the room began to shimmer, catch fire, and cave in.

Buffy felt no fear. She had known already that she was standing on the mouth of Hell.

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Angel listened attentively, his gaze going back and forth between Buffy and the pot he had simmering on the stove. "Toxoplasma?" he asked.

She nodded. "I wrote it down as soon as I woke up, and then googled until I got the spelling right. It's a real word."

"Yeah. A disease, isn't it?"

"I should have skipped Google and just asked you," she said, smiling. "That smells amazing. When can I drink it?"

Angel poured the cocoa into a porcelain mug and set it in front of her, but before she could take a sip, edged it back away and requested, "Wait, one more thing."

She stayed perched on her stool at the breakfast bar, watching him retrieve what he wanted from the refrigerator. "Ooh, whipped cream! Wait, why do you even own that?"

"There are things to put it on aside from food," Angel said casually as he inverted the can over her cup and released a puffy white stream. He let her gape at him for a second, then said, "I'm kidding. I picked it up for you along with the hot chocolate."

"Sweet of you." She stirred until the whipped cream dissolved, a full moon sinking into a cloudy sky. When Angel had teased her about drinking hot chocolate in the middle of the Los Angeles summer, she pointed out that he drank his tea just as hot, and that any opportunity for chocolate was a good one. It was in his cupboard the very next time she came over. "Anyway, I'm not sure how this toxoplasma thing is going to be relevant. I gave it to Giles to research, but I don't think we need to sit on our hands until we hear from him."

"No," he agreed. "What else did you get out of that dream? Werewolves, Hellmouth, Faith and Spike, makes me think-"

"Cleveland," Buffy supplied at the same time he said it himself. It wasn't any great surprise. Over the past few years, the Cleveland Hellmouth had been practically docile in comparison with the Sunnydale one, but it was still a likely source for supernatural trouble brewing. "According to their local news, they've had a streak of mysterious deaths lately, so all we need now is a fortune cookie telling us to hop on the next flight to Ohio."

Angel hesitated. He had been enjoying the nostalgia of the moment: sitting with Buffy in his home, talking about her dreams, helping her figure out where her destiny would take her next. When they had first met, and even before that, he had never been able to get enough of her, leaving him in perpetual fear of the temptation to overstep his bounds. He wasn't so paranoid now, but they were finally together again, and he just wanted to sit and listen to her and look and smell while she simply _was_. As far as he cared she could just talk forever, as long as she was talking while in a good mood and sitting in his kitchen.

Instead, he had to ask the question that might shatter the peace: "Us?"

Buffy dabbed a napkin to her lips, cleared her throat, and said, "Full disclosure: I'm a little nervous about this."

That was an unusual thing to hear from her. "Because of your dream?" he asked. "I know it's been awhile since you had one, but that doesn't mean the enemy at work here is any tougher than usual."

"Huh? Oh geez, no," she laughed. "I'm not nervous about _that_." She took a deep breath. "Angel, would you like to go out with me?"

Caught off guard, he laughed along with her. "What?" The terminology hadn't quite been settled yet, but as far as he understood it, he and Buffy were already "going out".

After they had both moved back to Los Angeles, him in a modern one-bedroom apartment, her with her Slayers in the Hyperion, they had each received a message from Connor that tricked them into seeing each other and talking out their issues. His plan had worked, inasmuch as they were now relaxed enough to spend time together without dancing around the fact that they had never fallen out of love. They hadn't yet come up with a solution for Angel's standing ban on intimacy, but they had also decided that they didn't yet need one.

Being together again felt reckless, but he had expected that. It was the joy that surprised him. Not once since they had made the decision had he lamented his suppressed desire for her; not once had she complained about the limitations they had imposed on themselves.

"It just seems like this is a good opportunity for some quality time," said Buffy. "And, sorry I don't have anywhere better than Cleveland to take you, but we always had more fun on the slaying dates than the dinner-and-movie kind anyway, didn't we?"

Angel reached across the kitchen bar to thread his fingers through hers. "I like any kind of date with you." His past few years, with neither Buffy nor his team from LA to fight alongside, had been a low point in his life even by his standards. Whatever Buffy had in mind would be a vast improvement.

She smiled uncertainly and squeezed his hand. "I want to find a way to make this last."

"Me too," he replied. "But if it doesn't last, it will still be worth it." He let go of her hand and sat back. "Now who do you propose we get to cover us here while we're in Cleveland?"

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Robin turned the key and got a satisfying click before the door swung open. The Hyperion was from an era when hotels in Los Angeles gave their guests real keys instead of cards, and he appreciated that Buffy and Angel had kept it that way. He wasn't overly enamored of the old-fashioned, but he did like the style here.

"Think this will do?" asked Buffy, hovering in the doorway.

He turned in a full circle, taking in the suite she had chosen for him. It was furnished in keeping with the Hyperion's grandiose origins, but decorated neutrally, as a commercial hotel room would have been. He didn't think anyone had been staying in it lately. "It will do just fine," he answered. "Anyway, I'm right down the street if I need anything from home."

Buffy nodded as they stepped deeper into the suite. "Cool. Well, we'll let you know when we have a better idea of how long we'll need you to stay here. The most important thing is that the Slayers know that you're around and that they can come to you with whatever problems come up. Unless they're woman problems, and they usually just talk to each other about those."

"Kate may stop in sometimes too. She's good with the younger girls."

Buffy seemed pleased. "Oh yeah? Does she want a room of her own?"

Robin had to laugh. "I hope not." It had taken him long enough to convince Kate to move into his own base of operations, a Slayer training facility where he lived and sometimes hosted allies, though the building was more suited to workout and strategy sessions. Buffy knew that he and Kate were involved, and that both were reluctant, for their own reasons, to let Slayer business absorb their lives too deeply, but she still took every opportunity to encourage them to spend more time at the Hyperion.

He couldn't really blame her. She was working toward a cohesive center to the Slayers' organization, and eventually that would mean merging Robin's program with her own. But he had been holding it down independently for years now, while she was living abroad and then in New York, and he wasn't sure he was ready to yield his position yet.

"What about Bethany?" Buffy asked. "We like Bethany. And there are so many girls her age here."

"Honestly, I think that's what keeps her away. She's not a Slayer. She'd feel left out." He liked Bethany, too. After the Battle of Los Angeles, she had searched for him on her own and found him, with no other objective than allying herself with someone who could help her use her telekinetic powers for a good purpose. She hadn't revealed everything about her past, but she trusted Angel and seemed to spend a lot of time on the phone with his son, and had easily warmed to Buffy by extension.

Buffy hesitated, then dipped her head in acquiescence. "Well, anyway. Thanks for Slayer-sitting. And for finding the guy with the plane. I'm meeting him in an hour, so my road ought to get hit."

Robin had been flipping the key around in his fingers; now he pocketed it and began thinking about what kind of clothing and necessities he would need to collect from home. He wondered if Buffy enjoyed this part of her job, or if she had grown tired of relocating, like he had after years of hunting Spike and looking for a purpose. "You sure you don't want to just send someone else to Cleveland?" he asked. "I know you've got an affinity for anything involving a Hellmouth and a bunch of mysterious deaths, but all these Slayers aren't just for show."

"Mmhm," Buffy agreed. "They can take on any other mission, but this one had a dreamtag. I'm the one that's gotta be there."

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"If the original Slayer is the one who has to take on this mission, why isn't she here?" Lorne complained.

Angel took a seat on the teal, retro-modern couch. Lorne hadn't invited him to sit, but for that matter, Lorne hadn't exactly invited him in, either. Since this chic little apartment was technically a demon's lair, there was no barrier against vampires. Angel wished he could believe that that suited Lorne just as well, but the tension that had risen between them before the Battle of Los Angeles had never really dissipated. "I didn't think you would want me bringing anyone else to see you," he replied.

"I'm the Host, remember? I host. Buffy has manners. Buffy is a glimmering star of righteousness. _Buffy_ ," he went on, beginning to sound heated, "has never once sent me to do her soul-crushing dirty work and then waste away in obscurity. Next time you need something for Buffy's sake, you can send her straight to me, because _Buffy_ is always welcome here."

There had been a time that Angel would have argued him down. Now he just sighed and asked, "So you're not gonna let me sing?"

Lorne went across the room to his wet bar and began mixing a drink for himself, leaving Angel to marvel that he had found an apartment with the setup for a wet bar, and that he still wasn't tired of Sea Breezes. "You can sing," the demon informed him between clinks and splashes, "but not from your playlist of desperation. You know what you're hearing now?"

"I've heard it before," Angel admitted. He leaned over to peek at the record player, but didn't see a name on the album that was spinning on it.

"Then sing along."

Angel groaned. "Seriously? Okay, uh...'A-hooooooooo, wer-"

Lorne held up a hand to stop him almost immediately. "That's enough."

"...It is?"

"There's only one thing you need to know about where you're headed, and it was waiting right under the surface. Let's try some free association, sugarplum. When I say 'wolf', what are the next two words that occur to you?"

Confused, but encouraged by Lorne addressing him with an embarrassing diminutive, Angel tried to play along. "Silver bullet?"

"No, no, no," said Lorne, taking an exasperated sip from his drink. "Not werewolf. _Wolf_."

"Ram," Angel replied, disquieted. "Hart."

Lorne lifted his glass in Angel's direction and nodded. "You didn't think you were going just to keep the Slayer company, did you? Take care, Champion. This is a dark ride."

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At the edge of the city, far down a road that Buffy had never used before, she found a private airport and a pilot who introduced himself as John Howell. He was a middle-aged man of small stature, and though he was friendly toward her, he seemed to approach everything with an air of great intensity. Clearly Wood found him trustworthy, but Buffy decided to spend a little time alone with him to let her instincts feel him out before they were in the air and at his mercy.

"Where'd you get a plane like this?" she asked as they strolled into the hangar to take a look at it. She couldn't really tell one from another, but she'd been informed that this plane, typical as it seemed, had the rare quality of necro-tinted windows - an absolute requisite for long-distance vampire transportation.

Howell came to a halt at the plane's nose and laid a hand on it beside the painted word _Romulus_ , the only ornamentation on it that Buffy could see. "Wolfram & Hart," he answered.

Buffy sprang back, hand poised to grab for her stake, but the pilot didn't show any surprise or fear. "It's alright," he said. "I'm not with them."

"Did you steal it?" she asked warily, keeping her fighting stance.

"Yeah, I stole it."

"Sounds like an interesting story and I want to hear it now, not later."

Howell shrugged. "I flew for them sometimes. Freelance. Most of us pick up that kind of work here and there, and there wasn't anything strange about them that I could see at the time." He sat down on a stepladder near the plane's wing, and nodded to a director's chair for Buffy. "There was some rioting when the battle busted out, well, I guess you know about that. Everyone else was going for liquor stores and electronics, I thought, hell, the company just went under, they're not gonna miss this baby."

Buffy settled into the chair, patting her concealed stake and leaving it in its place. She took another look at the plane, streamlined and shining under the hangar's bright lights, trying to see it from the perspective of a passionate aviation expert. "Wood told you why we need it?"

He nodded. "I know about the tinting. I know about Angel."

It wasn't the kind of reassurance she wanted. Angel might have a reputation bigger than the underworld he'd commanded, but to her, he was still a secret. Her secret. If Howell knew his weakness, he could hurt him.

"What are we paying you for this?" she asked.

"Enough."

"Would it help to threaten you too?"

He chuckled. "Are you afraid I'm some kind of spy for the law firm?"

"No, I'm afraid you're a smuggler for Jabba the Hutt."

At that, Howell's laughter rang out loud and clear. He stood up and pointed a finger at her. "If I am, just remember Han shot first." Still grinning, he patted the plane like a horse and turned back toward the hangar's office. "Go get your boss. The Romulus is ready whenever you are."

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The largest bar in Cleveland was called Satellite 3, and the longer that Oz lived there, the more he found out about it. Behind the establishment's front door was an inclusive, popular drinking place with frequent live entertainment, a limited menu, and the alleged best bartenders in the city. The tables farthest from the stage were arranged around an enclosed stairwell leading up to another door, which was unmarked but had a bouncer lurking around it at all times.

Once Oz had made a few friends in town, he had been invited in and found a much more intimate setting, softer lighting, and the actual best bartenders in the city. As far as he knew, there was no official name for the club behind the second door, but everyone who was aware of its existence tended to refer to it as Satellite 2.

The bar in there was curved around a tiny platform just large enough for a solo singer. Behind it was the third door, which Oz had thought was an employees-only area until the staff explained to him that even they weren't sure who to talk to about getting permission to enter. They did, however, occasionally mention the boss having a meeting in Satellite 1, and it wasn't hard to connect the dots.

Oz never bothered trying to learn more. The regulars at Satellite 2 were diverse, but with a high proportion of werewolves, and he had been accepted there into a kind of inner circle within Cleveland's pack. The atmosphere among them was generally relaxed and warm.

A favorite topic of the inner circle was whether or not there was a fourth door.

Tonight, Oz didn't need to go any deeper into the building than through the first door. The bartender nodded at him as he approached, then went back to arranging pint glasses until he realized that Oz was waiting at the bar rather than passing through on his way to Satellite 2. "Looking for someone?" he asked after taking and filling his order.

Oz lifted the cold glass of IPA off the bar and replaced it with cash. "That guy," he said, nodding further down the bar. "Thanks."

Spike was alone, staring off into space and near the bottom of his own glass. He raised an eyebrow when Oz took the vacant stool next to him, and greeted him with, "Well, if it isn't Small Dark and Variable."

"Hey man." Oz ran a hand through his hair, forgetting for the moment whether it actually was dark, or if Spike just hadn't seen him since the last dye and couldn't tell in this light. "Where's Faith?"

"Home and sleeping, by now."

"This early?"

Spike tapped his fingers restively on the bar. "Pair of fire demons did a job on us. She took 'em out alright, but we thought she could use an early night of it. What did you want with her, then?"

"Wanted to talk to both of you, actually," said Oz. "Giles called yesterday-"

He was interrupted by a cheerful, "Yo, Oz!" and turned to see a familiar couple, whom he had already smelled when they came in a moment ago.

It was the man who had spoken. "Tell me when we're gonna start a band," he continued. "You're killin' me here."

The woman laughed and Spike rolled his eyes, but Oz replied, "Right now. This moment. All of us are in it. Only instead of playing music we're going to solve those murders we keep hearing about in the Plain Dealer, and be ready to back up Buffy and Angel when they get here to fight whatever is doing it."

"Bloody hell!" said Spike. "When were you going to mention this?"

"I just got here," Oz pointed out. "Uh, you know Mr. E and Nina, right?"

Nina answered first. "Faith's boyfriend."

Spike nodded. "Angel's ex." He looked at E. "And...Angel's ex's boyfriend. Are you telling me he's on his way here, _with_ Buffy in tow, _well_ aware of this configuration? He's just a lit match looking for a puddle of gasoline, isn't he?"

Oz, who had never had much reason to fret about how the configuration developed, explained, "I think he's more the one who's in tow. Giles said Buffy had a Slayer dream and she's coming to check things out." He hesitated, not sure if he was meant to keep any part of his conversation with Giles private, but this much they deserved to know: "He said she dreamed about werewolves."

Mr. E and Nina shared a look with each other, then at Oz. "You know that killer is trying to frame us, right?" said Nina. "The bodies are all ripped apart, and people are already saying werewolves did it. Hell, people who didn't even believe in werewolves are saying that."

"I know," Oz assured her. "All the more reason we need to get involved."

She still didn't look happy, but Mr. E nodded. "We're here for whatever Buffy and Angel need from us," he said.

"Cheers," said Spike, but he was peering into his empty glass with a grumpy look on his face. "Lehane n' me are here for whenever you need someone to walk upright under a full moon. I'll go let her in on it." He stood up with a swirl of his black duster and headed for the door, throwing them a wave over his shoulder.

"That's a relief," said Nina. "Now we don't have to sit in this part of the bar."

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Angel trusted the plane's necro-tinted glass well enough, but he didn't think he would ever like flying. He wasn't sure how humans seemed to tolerate it so readily, some of them with alarming frequency. Maybe it had less to do with their mortality, and more with the times they had been born into. When he had been Buffy's age, the idea of climbing into a contraption like this would have incomprehensible, but for her, it was nothing but a sensible travel option.

She did spend much of the trip glued to the window, though, and he remembered that there had been few opportunities for flying in her youth. Her sense of wonder as the city's contours faded out beneath them consoled him a little, and he leaned closer and murmured, "Say goodbye to Los Angeles."

"You're not my boss," she informed him pleasantly without changing her position.

"Are you going to sulk about that all day?"

"Oh, _please!_ When you do that everyone calls it brooding."

He concealed a grin and rubbed her back, then weighed the possible consequences of standing up and decided to risk it. "I'll just give you some brooding space, then," he said. "Need to talk to Howell."

"'Kay. Tell him you're not my boss."

The cockpit was even more unsettling than the cabin in the small plane. Angel tried to follow Buffy's example and focus on the view, but the vastness of the sky was impressive in just the wrong way.

Howell beckoned him in and indicated the co-pilot's seat. "You vamps aren't big on being airborne, huh?"

Angel could only answer with a pained nod.

"Just think of it as a flying coffin," suggested Howell.

"Comforting." He managed a chuckle, but thought it best to change the subject. "You've seemed a little on edge yourself. Is it me or Wolfram & Hart?"

Howell looked surprised. "Wolfram & Hart's dead in the ground, and you seem like an alright guy. Why would I be on edge?"

"I can smell it. And I know it's not for the same reason I am, so I was curious."

For a moment Howell busied himself with the controls, checking a number of panels and indicators that could have meant anything. Angel didn't know if the pilot truly needed to concentrate on his job at the moment or if he was buying time before answering, but the new wariness between them certainly helped his own nerves. Intimidating humans was a familiar ground, even if it was generally a source of guilt at the same time.

"Alright, answer me this," Howell said at last. "What's so important that a vampire and a Slayer have to catch the first flight to Cleveland?"

"I thought you didn't care."

"That's what I thought too, but if I don't care, why am I doing this? I don't need the money. I wasn't looking for an adventure. You've obviously got some connection to Wolfram & Hart, and that's bad news for me and my redistributed plane. It's just not worth it."

Buffy entered as he was speaking and stood between them, her hand wrapped around one of the sturdy handles framing the door. "Seems like this could have been brought to our attention when we made you the offer."

"Excellent point," Howell replied, chopping the air with his hand for emphasis. "But it didn't even cross my mind until we were over Nevada, and now all I can think about is how never in my professional life have I been straining at the leash like I was when you told me where you wanted to go." His brow furrowed. "Well, that and wolves. Can't stop thinking about wolves, for some reason."

Angel had to make an effort to not catch Buffy's eye, knowing the same thing was on both of their minds. He spoke quickly before she could voice it, knowing that there was a chance their lives depended on maintaining a casual outward demeanor. "How long until we stop to refuel? We could go to a diner, talk about it there."

"Denver," said Howell reluctantly. "About an hour. You two better get back to your seats. Turbulence ahead."

It took Buffy's firm hand to take his elbow and guide him out of the cockpit, but he knew she was right - they were in no position to make any demands. They held each other tightly in their shared seat, Buffy still somehow capable of centering him even as he calculated their respective chances of surviving a crash.

But the turbulence turned out to be real, and when it was over, Howell announced over the intercom that he was beginning their descent. Their arrival in Denver came shortly after sunset, and they stepped out to a lonely station not far from the international airport but not, Howell said, affiliated with it. Everything here was clearly familiar to him, including the grizzled attendant who was firing jokes at them as soon as they stepped onto the ground.

Angel whisked Buffy behind the hangar while Howell and the old man took up a friendly argument about prices. "Toxoplasma," he whispered. "Remember what Giles told us?"

Giles had called them shortly before they left Los Angeles to discuss everything he had turned up with his research. Most of his information on toxoplasma was a reiteration of what they had already learned on their own, but he had also come up with a helpful theory that related it back to Hellmouth business: the disease of the natural world had been shown to affect the behavior of rats, manipulating them into harmful situations. The nearest supernatural equivalent, Giles reasoned, was mind control, with the added complication that the victim would find it indistinguishable from his or her own desires. If an infected rat could be attracted to the scent of cats, a man like Howell might have been cursed to pick up passengers that he otherwise wouldn't have.

"I know," said Buffy. "The guy bringing us to Cleveland is under the control of something evil that wants us in Cleveland. We're off to a great start."

Angel sighed. "I should have sent him to Willow as soon as I heard where he got that plane. It was stupid to think they wouldn't recover after the Battle of Los Angeles."

"I don't think Willow could do much about this anyway. If it works like a disease, she can't exorcise it or break the spell. And if you're really convinced this is your evil law firm we're dealing with…"

"It's not Wolfram & Hart. Just Wolf. One of the Senior Partners."

Buffy sounded frustrated, her voice at the edge of the hushed tone they had been keeping. "You know how random this sounds, right? Is the Wolf himself, All Cower Before Him, really going to bother with a string of old school murders and tinkering with one pilot's brain?"

"I don't know." Angel rubbed his forehead. "It doesn't make sense to me either. But Lorne said that's what the wolf in your dream meant, and we won't know what his plan is until we follow this through."

"Follow it through? You mean you're ready to get back in the air with him?"

Getting back in the air with Howell was the absolute last thing that Angel was ready to do, but he didn't see a way around it, and neither did Buffy. The people of Cleveland still needed their help, and they weren't going to learn anything by stranding themselves in Denver. "If he was going to kill us he would have done it already," Buffy pointed out. "Besides, you know I can't look at a trap without wanting to spring it," she added with a grin.

Angel nodded grimly. "What are we going to tell Howell?"

"As much of the truth as he can handle. If there's a way to get the Wolf out of his system, we have to help him." She glanced toward the hangar where they had left him. "Try to make him understand we're on his side. If he wants to cooperate, he should stick around in Cleveland with us while we look for a cure."

"I take it you're assigning this job to me?"

She nodded, then stretched up on her tiptoes to kiss him. "I'm going to get the Hellmouth welcoming crew caught up. Meet you at the diner."

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Faith found her hairbrush in the third drawer she opened in the bedroom. Dragging it through her hair, she glanced at the bed, and seeing that nothing had changed since she had left it, she nudged the mattress with her toe and said, "Yo, Cryptkeeper. Sun's shining and the birds are chirpy. Get your ass up."

"Faith," came the reply in a sour voice, muffled by a layer of blankets. "I am a _sodding vampire_."

"Really? Wow, that explains a lot." She turned and grabbed the mattress with both hands, giving it a good shake. "Doesn't get you out of this one, though. I'm gonna go pick up Buffy and Angel, so you need to get the guest room ready."

Spike poked his head out from the covers. "Made it out of Denver, did they?"

Faith put the brush back into the drawer and began the search for the shoes she wanted. "Yeah, B called again after you left last night and said they figured it out. That pilot who's possessed or whatever is gonna stay in town so they can maybe suss out what's wrong with him. Don't know where they plan on putting him, but Oz can probably get the pack to help, since we'll be no vacancy."

"No we won't," Spike countered, sounding just as sure of himself as he had last time they went over this. "Angelcakes will find any excuse not to share a roof with me. Buffy won't put up with the combination of any two of us. They'll thank you most sincerely and find somewhere else to lay their heads." He sat up and patted around the bed for his boxers.

She found them first and tossed them at his head. "Hey, maybe I'll just kick you out. Not like your name's on the deed." Her shoes finally appeared, and she sat down on the bed to tug them on. "Anyway, give 'em some credit. They won't make a fuss."

Spike rolled closer and latched his arms around her waist to kiss her neck before answering. "Don't throw me out, love. I'm the one keeps you lukewarm at night. And you'd have to do all the landscaping yourself."

His lips tickled, and she failed to suppress a laugh. "Whatever, just clean up that guest room before I get back with them." As she left, she noticed the wall calendar was still on June, and flipped the page to the new month. The image was a moonlit wildlife photograph, which made her smirk. When had her life become so wholesome?

The private plane that was carrying her guests had flown into a private airport rather than Cleveland Hopkins, so it was a longer drive to pick them up, but the parking was much easier. Faith's first thought when she saw Buffy with her luggage and Scythe was that she should have found someone to bring a second car. Her Mustang didn't have much trunk space.

As it turned out, though, she only had two passengers. "Howell got a taxi to a motel," Angel explained after they had all exchanged greetings and returned to the garage. "He's got some connections, so he said he'd take care of himself."

"You're not even keeping an eye on him?" Faith asked as they helped her load the car.

"It's really not scary enough to warrant constant supervision," said Buffy. "Angel, take shotgun, you need the legroom. Howell's been acting completely normal, he's just worried that he got touched by a hypnotic suggestion. Least we could do is dig up an answer for him."

Faith waited for Angel to arrange a blanket around himself to block the sun, and then started the car and pulled out of the garage. "Yeah, Giles called and gave us the same spiel about toxoplasma that you got. We're on Willow's mailing list, too. I heard a rumor she may be doing her astral projection thing so she can lecture us while we're all in the same place."

Buffy leaned forward from the back seat to stay in the conversation. "Hey, whatever works," she said. "Last I talked to her, she still sounded a little iffy about getting involved on your turf, but I think that was mostly about Oz. They've never really cleared the air. Have you seen him much?"

"Yeah, he shows up when Nina and I hang out sometimes. She's the alpha female of his pack, did you know that? Wait," she added, remembering Angel's connection. "Have _you_ guys cleared the air?"

Angel laughed. "Yes. Months ago. I'm glad she's happy here."

"Alright," said Faith, taking that at face value. "Anyway, Oz does some extracurricular research for us, but he's mostly sworn to the werewolf population now. Nina didn't even realize he and I knew each other from Sunnydale until I told her."

Since Angel had never spent enough time in Cleveland to establish a presence, and Buffy had barely made an appearance, Faith took a few minutes to fill them in on how the current players operated. "The only other Slayers are, y'know, non-practicing. We were pretty organized while Dawn was here, but now that we get most of our tips from you guys, these days it's basically me and Spike reading our email and going out to knock down whatever comes up."

"And you and Spike are living together?" Angel inquired.

Buffy reached over the seat and smacked his arm. "Angel, leave her alone!" she commanded, sounding appalled. "It's none of our business who she's living with." She turned to Faith. "Are you, though?"

More amused than offended, Faith decided to challenge them and answered, "You'll figure it out when we get there."

Angel held up his hands under the blanket in surrender, making him look like a black Halloween ghost. "Indulge us for the sake of logistics. Oz only has the one extra bedroom, and..."

Buffy flushed and smiled. "Okay, Nosy Guy raises a valid point. We're trying to avoid the cohabitation thing until we have more of a game plan for...us."

The car picked up speed as they reached the highway. Faith calculated that they would make it home just in time for Angel to take the blanket off. "Consider your drift caught," she told them. "My place comes with Spike. Who wants us?"

There was a pause, in which Faith suspected that Buffy and Angel were trying to meet each other's eyes through the blanket before they decided. Her mouth quirked, but she didn't interrupt them, and Buffy finally released a rueful laugh. "I'll stay with you guys, if you don't mind. Angel and Oz can bask in each other's silence."

Spike had been half right, Faith reflected: Buffy was staying with them, but Angel wasn't. She wondered if it really was about trying to sleep separately, or if Spike was half right about their reasons, too. Either way, they should all be able to handle this arrangement, but that didn't mean she was going to be off her guard.

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With a little foresight and courtesy toward the appropriate parties, Oz managed to set up a time to meet with Howell behind the second door. The staff assured him that only werewolves would be working in Satellite 2 that night, and that the bouncer would warn him if anyone of uncertain exposure to the underworld was about to enter.

"So you're the wolf expert?" asked Howell when they were facing each other across a two-seater table against the far wall.

"Not really," said Oz. "But we don't think you need one of those."

"Then what do I need?"

Oz scratched his stubble reflectively. "Maybe start by telling me exactly what happened."

The story was brief and direct, which earned the man a few points in Oz's book. Apparently, he was having doubts that his recent actions had been entirely of his own volition, and unlike the Sunnydale residents that Oz had grown up around, he had decided not to ignore them. "...I got a theory," he finished up. "I think I might be a psychic werewolf. Does that sound likely to you?"

"Hm." Oz thought about that for a moment. "What's a psychic werewolf?"

Howell's brow furrowed in consternation. "You mean that doesn't happen? You have to be bitten physically for it to have any effect?"

"Far as I know." People could get some weird ideas about what was real or possible now that they acknowledged the existence of the supernatural, but Oz wasn't tempted to laugh. He had heard weirder, and it wasn't as if anyone had been handed a guidebook. "What we've got so far is that there's an eldritch superbeing hacking brainwaves. It needed you to get Buffy and/or Angel here, so it made you want to do it." He paused to take a drink of beer, then went on, "There's been some deaths in town lately that the police can't explain. Bodies torn up, throats ripped out like a wild animal attack. And I know how it sounds, but they mostly haven't been on full moon nights. We're thinking the killer, or plural, is possessed by the same entity that nabbed you. So there's your silver lining if you want one - at least you didn't get mojo'd into killing anyone."

Silver lining or not, Howell looked understandably perturbed. "There are others? All programmed to do something, none of us realizing until it's too late?"

"Most likely."

"How do I know I'm not earmarked to murder someone now that my first job's done?"

Oz looked him in the eye and answered, "You don't."

"Jesus Christ," Howell exhaled, sitting back in his chair. He finished off half of his glass in one long swig. "I need to turn myself into jail or something. You guys shoulda told me sooner."

"Nah, we got you covered. A lot of werewolves around here have ways to lock themselves up if they have to. Privately. We can modify the cage in my place real easy, make it comfortable, but you won't even have to use it if someone's with you. No need to make your life any more difficult when we know you're not a criminal."

Howell smelled afraid, but he looked grateful, and a little surprised. His eyes focused for a moment on Kell, the bartender, who had no other customers to deal with and was quietly organizing things behind the bar. Then he looked toward the door, then back at Oz. "Okay," he said, using both hands to emphasize his words. "Here's another thing. You just met me" - he checked his watch - "two hours ago, and now you're offering to put me up in your own house, not even batting an eye? How do you know _you're_ not infected by this thing?"

Oz shrugged. "I'm always like this."

"Drink to that, I guess," said Howell, though his tone was skeptical. "Isn't there any way to, you know, get a diagnosis?"

"I don't know," said Oz. He hesitated, wanting to believe that the assistance he had provided so far was enough, and that he didn't have to pull himself any deeper into this. Howell still needed answers, though, and the killings in Cleveland needed to stop, and there was a resource that was still waiting to be tapped. "Hey Kell," he called. "Do you mind if I use your laptop for a moment?"

She took it out for him, and he got up and stood at the bar to type out a quick message. Howell, standing next to him, read it out loud: "'It's Oz, can we talk?' Who's the recipient here? This isn't even an email program."

"Yeah, she kinda transcended those." Oz saved the document with the name 'Willow', created a folder called 'Witch Network', and dropped it in. "She'll get it."

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Buffy squirmed, missing the big tables in the Sunnydale High library and the Magic Box. At the Hyperion she had a designated war room for sitting down as a group and spreading out papers and pictures to pore over, but here they were confined to Faith's kitchen. It was surprisingly clean, but not designed for more than two chairs to be pulled up around its little square table.

Right now there were four, though, and nobody else was complaining about it, so Buffy kept her focus on their work. Faith and Spike had already been busy collecting information on the murders which had happened so far, and Angel had gone into detective mode, speculating about possible connections and asking questions that Buffy wouldn't have thought to ask.

Profiles on the victims were all over the place, with no clearly noticeable trait shared by more than any two of them. But Faith had spoken to a few of the victims' relatives and found they had been perhaps overly paranoid about werewolf attacks, and Spike's queries in the underworld had given him the same impression. In addition, three of the victims had been quoted in articles about Cleveland's residents and their dismay over the supernatural entities now revealed to be living among them.

"Look here," said Spike, pointing to a news clipping and reading from it. "'I hate it. I'm afraid I'll get eaten if I even go outside at night.' Could be someone reading didn't like the sound of that."

Buffy frowned. "A disgruntled werewolf? Doesn't really jive with what we've got so far on the Wolf and his toxoplasma."

"Yeah," said Angel, staring intently at the article, "which would work in his favor. People getting killed for being too vocal about werewolves sows chaos, and puts us on the wrong trail. Not to mention he could infect a werewolf to use as his weapon as easily as he could anyone else."

The last time Buffy had talked to Giles, he had told her the same thing: anyone who was human or had once been human was vulnerable to the Senior Partner's influence. His pawns might be forgotten after completing their tasks, like Howell seemed to be so far, or they might keep carrying the infection, unaware, until the Wolf had disposed of or wholly corrupted them.

"Most of these people died in their own homes," said Faith, pointing to some of the dots scattered around the map. "But there are a few locations we can take you to if you think you can sniff anything out of them."

Before Buffy could ask Angel, or answer for both of them, everyone looked up as a voice behind her said, "I get first sniff, okay?" Buffy swiveled out of her chair: the voice was Willow.

Four voices greeted her in various shades of enthusiasm, but Willow held up her hands and said, "No time for hugs. Also I'm intangible." As if to prove it, she waded directly into the table through the chair that Buffy had just vacated, so that the map was at her stomach.

"Yeah, about that," said Faith. "I didn't even think you knew where I lived. Is this just a thing that's gonna be happening from now on?"

"Oz gave me your address. Doorbells are not so much at the moment." She peered down at the map. "Okay, everyone start taking notes. You see this?" Her finger traced a path that connected each of the murder locations in a wide arc. "Not random. The killer is setting up a Fibonacci spiral."

Spike grumbled low, "It's worse than we thought. Maths are involved."

Willow ignored him. "I've seen spells based on this sequence before. It doesn't have any power on its own, but it can be used in a ritual, like material ingredients, or planetary movement. So what you can assume is that the victims were picked for where they were, not who they were. And I didn't get the full list of dates and times but I'd bet large sums that Fibonacci applies there, too."

"So they were all sacrifices?" asked Angel. "What kind of ritual is it?"

"No idea, but if you're sure it's the Wolf, you can expect the den mother of all bad days. Now, ready for the good news?"

Buffy perked up. "Oh how I love you, Will."

"Mutual, sweetie." Willow traced the curve on the map again, but this time continued it past the marker dots. "We can predict the exact place and time of the upcoming murders, _and_ the final stage of the ritual, and prevent the everloving heck out of them." Her fingertip stopped, dipping slightly beneath the table's surface, at the spot where the coil had completed.

Faith half-rose from her chair to get a better look. "Hang on. That's Satellite 3."

"What's that?" asked Angel.

"Bar," Spike answered, with the same perplexed expression as Faith. "Down on Rye Street, not far from here. Good fried pickles. You mean to say that's where the ritual will go off?"

"I just came from there," Willow confirmed. "Werewolf hotspot, Oz says."

Buffy leaned on her elbows and inspected the unfamiliar place names on the map. "So how do werewolves tie in?"

Willow shook her head regretfully. "Figuring that one out is going to have to be your job. But remember, even if the Wolf is the one responsible for the killings, he's doing it by infecting humans. You've still got a culprit to find."

"A werewolf culprit would kinda make sense, yo," Faith pointed out.

"We'll sit down with the Cleveland pack leaders as soon as we can," said Angel. "Willow, can you tell us anything else about how this infection works? Is there a cure?"

Willow raised an eyebrow at him, as if surprised he would ask such a dumb question. "It's not a biological condition. It's not magic, either. It's a Senior Partner Special, so if anyone has a cure, it's a Senior Partner. Get one of those guys on our side and we'll see what we can do." She took a step back, so that she appeared to be standing around the table with them instead of fused with it. "The best thing to hope for is that it flushes out naturally after the host performs whatever go-fetch the Wolf wanted done. And it shouldn't affect the memory, so anyone who's killed someone knows they did it."

Buffy glanced from Willow to the others, and ended up directing her next question mostly at Angel. "What's more likely? That the Wolf picks a different killer each time to throw off the investigation, or that he puts it all on one person so they're less likely to confess?"

Angel was silent for a moment, then rubbed his chin and looked up. "Howell hasn't even done anything that bad, and he's already a potential wrench in the works just by cooperating with us. I don't think any strategic overlord would allow too many like him to walk free. Willow, what could the Wolf be working right now? Aside from the human sacrifices?"

Willow seemed to be putting some effort into maintaining a neutral tone. "Yeah, that's the other thing. He's going to want a body. A permanent one."

The idea of an innocent man being possessed by a Senior Partner for the rest of his life seemed to spread through the group, one by one. Nobody voiced any questions, but Willow filled up the silence anyway, saying, "Any of his targets could become his host. And, honestly, probably already has, although it may take time to manifest. If your Howell guy keeps doing stuff without knowing why, or if the stuff gets worse and he starts finding ways to justify it...he's probably the one. I'm not telling you what to do about it, but: no cure. Just keep that in mind."

It wasn't going to be hard to keep that in mind, Buffy thought. She doubted she'd be able to think about anything else for a while. "Can you point us to the next murder?" she asked.

"I'll have to get the exact times and places of the other ones and do some calculations, but give me the approximates right now."

"Three days ago and twelve days before that," Angel answered promptly.

Willow nodded. "Good, then you have at least four days. I'll be in touch." Her projected form flickered, just enough to be noticed by someone who was looking directly at her.

Faith cleared her throat, sounding vexed. "Yeah, hey, Willow. Is this not worth hauling your actual body out here to help us?"

Even Spike looked surprised that she would venture there, but Willow only glared a little and said, "Look, you don't have an arcane disaster monopoly here. I'm doing what I can but I'm stretched skinny. Email me." She faded and vanished almost instantly, and Buffy couldn't tell if she had meant to say goodbye to them first or not.

After that, there wasn't much left for the four of them to discuss without her. Buffy and Angel volunteered to patrol, and Faith and Spike left the house with them, locking the door behind them. "Got a few more sources to check with," explained Spike. "Most of 'em folks you'd scare away if you came with us."

He and Faith set off down the street together, and Buffy slipped her hand into Angel's as they went walking in the other direction. It was a pleasant neighborhood, the street lined on each side with houses that were small, but maintained with pride. "They seem to be doing well," said Buffy, the only positive commentary she could come up with at the moment.

"Mm," Angel agreed. "That doesn't bother you, does it?"

"No. Not anymore. They didn't get this for free." She sighed deeply. "Willow looks worn out. She hadn't told me much about what she's up to lately. If she's going to keep doing everything over astral projection anyway, I wish she'd at least leave her body with us."

Angel hesitated, then said, "Sounds like she talked to Oz before us. I'll ask him about it when I see him."

"Thanks." Buffy smiled, genuinely. Talking to someone about something personal was an offer that Angel didn't make lightly.

Ten minutes' walk took them out of the neighborhood and into an area where they were more likely to find a vampire if any happened to be out tonight. It was a rare advantage to be hunting in a place where they wouldn't be recognized, and Buffy kept her eyes and ears open, hoping for the satisfaction of a good slay. Before long, though, they fell back into conversation, and unusually, Angel was the one who started it.

"When I went to see Lorne before we left, he accused me of making other people do my dirty work. At Wolfram & Hart it was always about the lesser of two evils, every single time. I don't think anyone's ever really forgiven me for the choices I made."

Buffy didn't have to stop to consider her response. "I have."

He squeezed her hand. "Coming back to you is the one thing I know I'm doing right. From now on we make these choices together. If Howell is hosting the Wolf, you're the only one I trust to decide what to do about it."

"Angel, don't elevate me like that. I don't always know what to do. I've got a long log of my own mistakes to dwell on."

"Then I forgive you for those," said Angel, "so talk to me if you think you're about to make another."

For the briefest moment, Buffy felt like everything had fallen into place. If she could hold onto it a little longer, she might begin to understand how to live.

There were more people on the street now than they had been seeing so far, and Buffy realized that many of them were clustered around the only building on the block still lit for business. Overhead was an old-fashioned neon sign with a cosmic design and the name "Satellite 3".

"This is the place that Willow was talking about," Buffy realized out loud. "The center of the spiral."

"Well," said Angel. "Let's go in."

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"There's no fourth door," a slightly drunk werewolf was saying. She waved her arm in expansive gestures to support her theory. "Satellite 3 is out there, Satellite 2 is in here, Satellite 1 is in there. Three, two, one. What would be next, Satellite Zero?"

"No no no," replied her companion, also a werewolf, at about the same level of intoxication as she was. "The point is, each room is a _satellite_ , so they have to be orbiting something." He cast a hazy look at the door to Satellite 1. "I bet it's a meth lab."

Oz had explained to Howell earlier that he was likely to overhear a few conspiracy theories about the fourth door, but Howell had departed not long ago, pursued by his own paranoia, so Oz kept his amusement to himself as he sat at the bar until the couple had exhausted that topic and moved on to another. He didn't want to join in anyone's conversation, but he didn't exactly want to be alone, either.

Seeing Willow again had rattled him. She had been cordial, if distracted, and had spent only a few minutes with him and Howell before taking her astral form away to visit Faith's house. He wished he could tell how she felt about seeing him again.

The conspiracy theory couple made their way to the door back out to Satellite 3. They were the last patrons there except for himself, Oz realized, and he checked the ornate clock over the bar. "I can get out of here if you're trying to close up," he said to Kell, who had her feet up and looked like she was doing a crossword puzzle.

She shrugged, but then put down her book and pen and stood up. "Hey," she said, leaning over the bar. "Didn't mean to eavesdrop, but you guys weren't that quiet and you can't really hide an astral projection in here. I just want to know if something's coming up that all of us should be worried about."

"I don't know yet," he answered. "If anything, it's probably already here."

Kell nodded sadly. "The killings..."

"And whether or not it was one of us, we'll get blamed for it. Yeah. I'm on it, but stay safe, Kell."

Before she could respond, there was a loud crash coming from outside the room. Satellite 2 was soundproofed enough that it was a surprise to hear anything at all from Satellite 3, even with the supernaturally sharp hearing that Oz and Kell shared, and they only had to exchange one worried glance before both headed to the door and down the stairs, dismissing the bouncer as they passed him on the way.

The crash was followed by angry voices, and by the time they got into the main room, most everyone there had backed up to the walls, forming a spectator circle around a tipped-over table. The werewolf couple who had just been talking upstairs was there, the man standing before the woman as if to protect her from an unfamiliar girl in a short dress and smeared makeup. "She's a _monster!_ " the girl screamed, pointing. "She's a _werewolf!_ "

The werewolf woman wasn't saying anything at all, and the man's words were too fast, with too many interruptions, to be coherent. He made one threatening step toward the girl in the dress, and another man came up to push him back. About five different onlookers accused them, and each other, of being drunk.

Oz wasn't sure if there was a hope of calming anyone down, but he knew it was his last chance before the fight became physical. The werewolves would recognize him, so he turned to them first, holding out his hands disarmingly and moving slowly to get between them and the others. Before he had made it there, though, he saw to his surprise that he wasn't the only interfering pacifist.

"Hi Oz," said Buffy over her shoulder as she stepped in front of the girl who had been screeching accusations. Angel, at her side, looked at him and nodded once.

"Buffy, Angel," he greeted them each in turn. Having three people in the middle instead of one was a significant advantage; already the combatants didn't seem to know who to be yelling at. "Been a while. How's LA?"

Buffy shrugged, looking and sounding as casual as if nothing of interest was happening around them. "We get by. Thanks for letting Angel stay with you, by the way."

As she talked, she shifted her feet and moved her body subtly so that nobody behind her could walk through the conversation and get at their opponents. Angel was doing the same thing, gradually widening the zone of neutrality that they had created, and Oz realized that he had been doing it himself. It was working. People near the back were dispersing, bored, and the ones at the center of the dispute seemed reluctant to continue it without a mob to back them up.

"No trouble," Oz responded to Buffy.

Angel caught the double meaning and grinned at him. "I don't make much noise."

There was the sound of a woman stalking away in a huff, and Oz quietly noted their victory. Then someone touched his shoulder, and he snapped back to wariness until he registered that it was Kell. "The boss is watching," she said in a hushed voice. "He wants you and your friends to leave."

Oz looked up and around. He didn't know who Kell's boss was, but there was an unfamiliar grey-haired man in a suit jacket near the door to Satellite 2, leaning against the wall and looking very, very cross. It had to be him.

How their actions could have offended him, Oz didn't know, but it wasn't time to ask questions. "Okay," he said to Kell, then motioned at Buffy and Angel. "You guys ready to bounce?"

They both looked confused, but acquiesced easily once they saw that the fight wasn't about to rekindle. Oz led the way to the exit, and Kell accompanied them, casting the occasional worried look in the direction of the glowering suit. When they were all safely outside the door, she said at a normal volume, "Thanks for not making a fuss. You're not 86'd or anything, we just can't negotiate his rules when he's here."

"I've never seen him before," said Oz. "Who is he?"

Kell raised an eyebrow at him. "Dameon Wolfe," she stated. "He owns the place."

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The Wolf watched the sacrifice, and the sacrifice watched the clock, a sharp kitchen knife held in her lap. When the minute changed, she lifted the knife to her neck and slashed hard. There was time, before she lost consciousness, to question the act. She had felt fine, she thought, when she woke up this morning. For how long had she meant to do this? Why had the digits on the clock become her signal to end her life?

She saw the Wolf, naked and hungry, standing over her as she lay in her blood on the floor, and then her eyes closed and did not open again. The Wolf's jaws lowered to her throat.

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The phone rang in the early morning, and Giles woke up wondering, as he often did, if he was about to learn of a death.

It was Faith, calling from Cleveland - five hours behind, meaning she hadn't yet gone to sleep. Her voice was apologetic, but tense. "Willow wants to talk to both of us. She's coming to you, if you're okay with that."

"Yes," said Giles, reaching first for his glasses and then his dressing gown and slippers. He went out to the parlor holding the cordless phone, and found Willow already there. She was sitting on the couch, looking almost natural except for the way the light hit her. In fact, he could see places where it was going right through her.

She greeted him with a small, "Hi," but he could only answer, "Willow, are you quite alright? You look..."

"Translucent?" she suggested. "Yeah. I'm under some strain. Is Faith on the line?"

He picked up the parlor telephone, set it on speaker, and turned off the cordless. Faith's voice came through and cut straight to the chase. "We had another murder in town. Want to fill him in, Red?"

Another murder. Cleveland. Hellmouth. Buffy and Angel. Giles wanted to ask about them, but he knew that he would only interrupt the relevant news. "She was ripped apart like all the others," Willow said. "All alone like the others. Along the same path as the others."

Faith's breath gave the room a second of static. "Spike and I are at the scene, but the cops won't talk to us. Willow, I thought you'd plotted out the spiral so we would know when the next one was coming. Did you misplace a digit or something?"

"I misplaced a whole life," Willow confessed. Giles noticed that her face was streaked with drying tears. "It must have been a, a homeless person, or someone nobody knew about. It wasn't in the news. The sequence is further along than we thought."

"Can you recalculate to account for it?" asked Giles.

She nodded. "But, Giles, this isn't about getting our strike team into the right place at the right time. The death roll will keep gaining momentum as long as the Wolf has control of at least one human body. Soon he won't even have to send assassins; the deaths will just _happen_ , and all he has to do is take his host to the center of the spiral and be there when it terminates." She drew a deep breath, then looked at him, and at the phone, with an oddly defiant expression. "Isn't anyone going to ask what happens if he completes the quest? Or is it too obvious that he'll be invincible and we're all doomed?"

It was no wonder she looked so tired, Giles thought. She must have been researching incessantly, in addition to projecting herself all over the world to communicate with everyone, if she had come up with this much knowledge on the ritual in play.

There was a brief pause, and then Faith said, "So we'll skip the strike team crap and go straight for the host."

Willow stared at the floor. "How? We don't even know who it is."

"We have a decent lead," Giles noted. "Two, in fact. Buffy called tonight…" he looked at the clock. "Er, last night. The owner of the club where the spiral will end is a man named Damien Wolfe. A bit on the nose, but I would be even more surprised to find it was coincidence."

"Howell doesn't exactly look like a coincidence either," said Willow. "Oz put me in touch with him, and he called _me_ yesterday and said he knew how the ritual was supposed to work and he didn't know how he knew. And neither of them are werewolves."

Faith groaned. "Well, do they have to be?" Her voice became more distant for a moment as she spoke to someone on her end of the call: "I know, I'm talking to them right now. Hold on."

Giles shook his head. He hadn't sat down yet, and he realized that he was subconsciously hoping that his "guests" would leave before it was worth getting comfortable for the conversation. "No," he said. "Buffy's dream featured werewolves, but we don't know if that's of any importance."

"It's probably of any importance," Willow countered.

"Okay, so what are we supposed to do about it?" Faith pressed her.

Willow's form left the couch and paced the room, losing a little more opacity as it did. "I don't know! You're the one in Cleveland! Tell Buffy, tell Angel. Make Spike start earning his keep. Oz can get the wolfpack on your side. We're running out of time. This is a _virus_. It's only going to spread."

There was a pause, with some unclear sounds coming from the speakerphone, and then Faith said, "Spike wants to know if the person the Wolf chose as his human body still has their soul."

"Oh, _Spike_ is the one concerned about that?" Willow snapped.

Giles cleared his throat and gave her a reproachful look, then answered Faith himself. "As far as we understand it, yes. But as the condition means progressive corruption, it seems that allowing a clean retreat to the afterlife would be the greatest act of mercy we can deliver."

Both of the girls went silent. It crossed his mind that Faith was a disembodied voice, and Willow was a psychic projection. He was, in fact, alone in his own home.

He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

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Buffy and Angel both automatically stopped walking at the end of the long path to Nina and her boyfriend's rustic wooden house. "Nice place," said Buffy. She liked the wall of bamboo at the edge of the property and the rooftop solar panels glinting in the moonlight, although she knew the secluded hillside location was better suited to werewolves than Slayers.

"She's good with plants," Angel agreed.

Buffy eyed him sideways with amusement. "So on a scale of one to karaoke, how awkward is this going to be?"

He smiled back at her. "Depends. What are you plotting?"

"Don't blame me, I just work here."

"Then we should be fine."

When Angel knocked, it was an intricately tattooed man in his twenties or early thirties who welcomed them inside, taking care to make the invitation explicit for Angel. Buffy allowed herself one sweeping glance around the interior before asking, "Mr. E, I take it?"

He nodded. "Eric, at home."

The word _home_ resonated with Buffy as she and Angel took the seats he offered them at the kitchen table. The house was modestly furnished, but everything seemed sturdy and hand-crafted. Art was everywhere - big canvasses on the walls, unique sculptures on the countertops, a sketchbook left open on an armchair. There was a sense of harmony between the two occupants that instantly severed any doubts that Buffy might have had about whether Nina was truly over Angel, in spite of the absence of the ex in question.

"Where's Nina?" asked Angel, voicing Buffy's own thoughts. As far as she knew, the plan had been to meet both of them here.

Eric handed out bottled drinks as he answered, swiftly producing a ginger beer for Buffy when she turned down the microbrew he offered first. "She's at work," he said, before sitting down with them in the living room. "Her schedule's a little haywire with these night classes she's teaching. But I can try to help you out until she gets here."

Buffy tried not to catch Angel's eye. Mr. E was an important part of the Cleveland pack and she didn't want to lose his trust, but on the other hand, it was the first time that either she or Angel had met him in person. Strictly speaking, they couldn't even know for sure that he was the right guy. He might have broken in and killed Nina and Mr. E and was now acting the part so he could kill them too…

She tried and failed to smother a sudden guffaw, drawing confused looks from both Angel and the alleged Eric. "Alright, Wolf," she said in her best faux-tough voice. "The Huntsman's onto you, so cough up Red Riding Hood and Grandma before we split your belly open."

After that - and a timely reminder from Angel that only the real Eric could have invited him in - the ice was broken. Eric relaxed and spoke at length about his friendship with Oz, and how impressed he was by Faith's handling of the Hellmouth. Buffy wasn't sure how to navigate their real purpose here, but Angel kept the conversation moving and she soon realized that he was steering it naturally toward questions about the pack. It was as good as any place to start, she thought, and sat back to hear what Eric had to say about it.

This would be their last chance to meet at night for the next few days, he reminded them, as the change began tomorrow. "It's going to be crazy this month," he grinned, shaking his head. "The full moon falling on the Fourth of July, that's rare. Some of our younger members have never even seen fireworks while they're transformed."

Buffy blinked, imagining it. "Will they be okay?"

He affirmed that they would and explained the measures the pack had in place to keep each wolf safely contained, concealed from the public, and at minimal risk of hurting themselves or each other. When Angel inquired about the enclosures, Eric brought them out back and showed them the one that he and Nina used. Buffy couldn't see much beyond the porch light and fireflies, but Angel pointed out a robust fence that disappeared into the darkness, and Eric described the others like it throughout the neighborhood.

"From our roof you can see two others besides ours," he said. "One's the biggest, too - all the males without pack partners or families use it." He gazed out into that direction, then swung back around to face them. "Hey, I have an idea. Why don't you two come over on the Fourth and watch? If you're researching werewolves, you won't get a better view than this. Buffy can come early and get a burger out of it too."

Angel was instantly appreciative, and Buffy loved the idea. "Shouldn't we ask Nina first, though?" she said before accepting.

"Yeah, of course," Eric said quickly, but he sounded solemn now, and he led them back indoors to carry on the conversation in the ample light of the living room.

"It's true Nina's working tonight," he said as he removed the sketchbook from his armchair to sit, "but I also planned it so you'd get here before she did. Maybe you can set me straight if this is all my imagination, but she's been acting a little weird."

Before she even had to hear any more, Buffy's heart dropped. She hoped desperately that it was Eric's imagination, but past experiences had all but ruled that option out.

Angel leaned forward, real concern written on his face. "How?"

"It seems like..." Eric sighed. "Her priorities changed. We used to be on the same page about everything. We talked about marriage and decided we didn't need it. We're not planning on children, but we agreed to bring it up again once a year to see if we'd changed our minds. We're saving up to buy this place-" he gestured at the snug walls around them - "and that's all we wanted. I would say I thought we were happy, but the thing is, I _know_ we were happy. We can smell it on each other."

Before she had realized she was doing it, Buffy had shifted a little closer to Angel, and his arm came down subtly around her shoulders. She had been wary about acting as a couple during this mission, but Eric had made her feel welcome, and it was impossible to not think about her own relationship while listening to him. She couldn't sniff out Angel's emotions, but she had a hunch that it wasn't so different from the empathic awareness of each other that they shared. Angel had been happy traveling with her, and that wasn't a guess. "How is she different now?" she asked Eric.

He thought about it for a second, then said, "Ambition. I know that doesn't sound like a bad thing, but it came out of nowhere. She's talking about our careers all the time, coming up with ways to make more money. Yesterday she told me, for the first time ever, that she missed living in the big city. And when it comes to the pack…"

Angel's prompt sounded soft but urgent: "What about the pack?"

"Well, you know she and I are the alphas. But you know what that entails? Pretty much jack. We host a meeting once in awhile and send out a monthly bulletin. I honestly think ninety percent of the reason we were elected is because we're both good at graphic design. But now, Nina wants to organize. She says I need to take a firmer leadership role. She's bringing up things like combat training, with a straight face." He rubbed a patterned hand through his hair, then looked up at Angel. "What possible use would we have for _combat_ training?"

"Nothing I'd like to think about," Angel replied gravely.

Eric raked a hand through his hair. "So, what's your take? Am I just paranoid?"

"Let's not say no to that yet," said Buffy. "But for one thing, Eric, and I mean this, it's good you told us. If there's a way we can help you or Nina, we will. Just don't go panicking yet."

"It might not be supernatural at all," Angel added. "Nina's been through a lot. It can be hard to adjust to a good life."

"I came home to Sunnydale once acting like such a creep that my friends were sure I was possessed," Buffy piped in again. "And that was just the first time I died."

Eric nodded pensively, then said, "...First?"

They all managed a slightly strained laugh, and the mood began to lighten. They were sharing stories and equipped with another round of drinks when Nina finally came home.

Buffy had given her feelings an honest examination before they came, wanting to know if she needed to brace herself, but she had concluded that she wasn't jealous of Angel's ex at all. When she took her hand and said how good it was to meet her at last, she was sincere.

However, she soon got the impression that Nina wasn't. All of the right movements were there, the smiles and pleased exclamations, but there was a hollowed-out undertone to them characteristic of a bored spouse attempting courtesy at a social function. Buffy didn't think Eric was the type to tolerate that in a relationship, and she knew Angel wasn't. Nina introduced herself to Buffy with a limp hug that barely made contact, but then pressed herself to Angel in a very familiar and faintly sensual embrace. It didn't last long enough for anyone to object, but Angel looked uncomfortable, and after that point they quickly moved on to the shop talk by unspoken agreement.

Since they hadn't dropped any details on what they knew aside from Buffy's Slayer dream, it was easy to keep Nina talking about her pack. "They're wonderful," she said with a big, phony smile. "They're like our family. Nothing's more important to me than the pack."

"I know what you mean," said Buffy. "Some of my friends have really become more like my family, too. Not nearly as many as you have in your pack, though."

Angel came in with that tone he had that always seemed to put people at ease. "That raises an interesting point, though. Is every werewolf in the area part of your pack, or are there some that don't associate with you?"

"No," Nina replied. "None that we know about, anyway. Anyone in the city or the Hellmouth area is ours."

"I see," Angel said gravely. "I was hoping…." he sighed. "Nina - Eric - I know there's been a lot of unfair discrimination toward your people lately, but we have to talk about the possibility that a werewolf really is behind some of the recent crime. Have you felt any suspicions about anyone you know?"

Eric looked distressed, Nina merely surprised, and she recovered quickly. "There's one. Jordan Godfrey. He's been so wild lately, and I want to say it's just typical teenager stuff, but sometimes, really, he makes me nervous."

"You never told me that." Eric kept his cool, but his voice was wounded.

"Oh, I didn't want to worry you."

It wasn't much later that Angel began suggesting that they had taken enough of Eric and Nina's time, and Buffy followed his lead, wanting to talk to him privately. Before they left, they confirmed that they would be back for the Independence Day barbecue and wolf-watch - "Won't that be _fun!_ " Nina cooed, and Buffy cringed and knew that the same reaction was behind Angel's impassive mask.

Some tension seemed to leave him as they walked back out into the night, and he slipped his hand into hers as they made their way down the leafy tunnel that the trees formed over the road. "What did you make of that?" asked Buffy gently after long minutes of silence.

"Nina's the Wolf," he answered. "God help us."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the story of Connor getting Buffy and Angel back together, see [Indeterminate Time](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1054304).  
> For how Bethany went looking for Robin Wood, see [Infinity Questions](http://archiveofourown.org/works/987355).  
> For Oz settling down in Cleveland, see [Chorus](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1173682).  
> For the introduction of Mr. E, see [Phases of the Moon](http://archiveofourown.org/works/986818).  
> For pretty much everything Spike/Faith related, see [The Further Adventures of Spike and Faith](http://archiveofourown.org/works/987321/chapters/1946951), a little series of its own.


	2. Chapter 2

Angel returned to Oz's house in the morning hours before sunrise, but Oz was still up. He nodded a welcome from the stool where he sat in the small living room, strumming an unplugged guitar. Angel nodded back, took a few aimless steps, and opened his mouth to speak, but before the words were out, there was a knock at the door.

Oz hopped up and set down the guitar carefully before going to answer it, and Angel, lurking behind him, heard Howell's voice, frank and urgent: "I need to use your cage."

Between the two of them, Oz and Angel coaxed the pilot into sitting with them and discussing where this new sense of alarm had come from. Angel hadn't even yet had a chance to tell Oz about the new prevailing theory on whom was hosting the Wolf, and he wasn't sure he wanted to bring it up around Howell, but the man beat him to it: "There's a woman. Young, pretty. Turns into a wolf, not a wolf, it looks like one but it walks on two legs, and she rips them up with her teeth. I don't know why I know. She was there the last time, and she'll be at the next one. Follow her, see for yourself. She's been there all along. I wasn't. I don't know how I know." He took a deep breath, waved away the beer that Oz offered him, accepted a glass of water from Angel instead. "That was the important part," he added.

"What else do you know?" asked Angel.

"I know I'm not finished. I brought you here for her, and she'll take you out, you and Buffy, when she's ready. But I'm not done. There has to be more, more blood, more chaos. As long as I'm free I'll be hunting."

Oz leaned his elbows on his knees, looking grim. "That's why you want the cage?"

"Yeah."

"How do we know you're not saying this to throw us off your scent?" Angel inquired. He felt terrible for the man, but they couldn't afford to get sentimental now.

"Jesus, I don't know. Just follow her. I know exactly where the next death will be, and when. I can take you there."

Oz made a placating gesture. "So do we. It's alright, Howell. I'll go get the cage set up now."

Temporarily left alone with Howell, Angel turned the interrogation to a more personal note. "Do you have any idea why the Wolf wanted me and Buffy to be here? Does it just make it easier for her to kill us?"

The man looked pensive, taking a few moments to consider before answering. "I don't think you can trust me to answer that," he said finally. "If she doesn't want you to know something, I'll lie to cover it up. That's why I had to tell you the important part all at once, before I could think about it too much."

"Okay," said Angel. "Thanks." He stopped himself short of asking another question. What good would it do? Anyway, if Buffy was directly in danger from the Wolf, protecting her was his own duty, not Howell's.

Oz returned and showed Howell downstairs, explaining that a cage was a cage but he had dragged in all the furniture that would fit through the door, plus a broomstick to bang on the ceiling if for any reason he couldn't reach Oz using his cell phone.

"This is temporary," said Oz when he returned alone. "This has definitely got to be temporary."

"Mm," Angel agreed. They sat back down in the living room, and Angel summarized what he and Buffy had learned from their evening with Nina and Mr. E. Oz listened attentively, with a deepening frown on his normally expressionless face.

"So what do you think?" Angel concluded. "Have you noticed Nina acting strange at all lately?"

Oz answered with a reluctant nod. "I didn't think it was anything supernatural at the time, but now it all makes sense."

"They invited us to the Independence Day cookout, so we'll be able to see if there's anything new going on with her transformation. Other than that, I guess the plan is just to show up at the next scheduled crime scene, like Howell said." He supposed the plan should include something about how to deal with Nina if she was there, but he wasn't ready for that. "And Oz, I'm going to have to ask you to keep this a secret for now. At least from Nina and Eric."

"No."

The word was so unexpected yet so casually spoken that it took Angel a moment to comprehend it. "What?"

"I said no. Hey man, I get that cloak and dagger is your M.O., but they're my friends. They're my pack leaders. Take a couple days to figure out how to break the news, but make sure it gets broken, or I'll do it."

Angel met his eyes across the room, and neither gaze wavered as the seconds ticked by. "I'm not going to hurt Nina," he said.

"Good," Oz replied. He stood up. "There's clean towels in your room. Sleep tight."

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Buffy had settled into Faith's study and found it more comfortable than she had expected, even though the house only had one bathroom, and Spike, as Faith put it, "takes showers so long he's gonna drain Lake Erie one day." There was a futon, a computer, and a window, and since she was a guest, nobody got into her space or put too many demands on her time. Her only fear was that she would overhear Spike and Faith having sex one night. If that happened, her best hope was probably to quietly sneak outside and run.

She still wished that she could have shared a bed with Angel, but he wasn't far. Today, she had come to Oz's house around noon and crept into the guest room, where Angel greeted her with a sleepy smile. She took a moment to rest her head on his bare chest and share a few words before leaving him with a kiss and a command to get more sleep.

Oz was waiting for her in the kitchen. He led the way out to his car, and Buffy noticed with a pang that his relative silence had a different vibe than usual. She tried to start a conversation about the vehicle having a lot of character - it really did - but his response was little more than a grunt.

She tried again as he took them through parts of Cleveland that would never get a mention in a tourism book. "Why do they want us to meet them there? And in the daytime? Angel would have liked to come too..."

"So would Howell. Trying to avoid that." He kept his eyes on the road, his tone flat. "And tonight's a lunar no-go for me and them. I would have saved it a few days but Nina called me at six this morning. Didn't want to wait."

Buffy's face flushed a little as she tried to imagine how that conversation had gone. She thought she and Angel had been subtle enough about their suspicions while they were at Nina and Eric's house, but it wasn't likely that she was being summoned to talk about something unrelated. From what Angel had told her, Oz probably felt like he was in the middle and trying to choose a side, which wasn't at all what Buffy wanted.

"You know she tried to frame your cousin, right?" she blurted out suddenly. "Jordan Godfrey. He's the one who turned you into a werewolf, isn't he?"

Oz flinched, but his voice was accusatory. "What do you mean?"

"We asked if they had doubts about anyone in the pack and she made it sound like he was dangerous. You told us before he's a good kid. I believed you. So what's her deal?"

"She's infected," he said curtly. "We have to help her. Isn't that what this is all about?"

Buffy couldn't think of a response. Oz pulled the car into the almost empty parking lot of Satellite 3, which looked considerably different without its festive lights and animated crowd. It was hard to tell if the place was even open until they got to the door and she saw the hours posted. They were, however, the only ones there aside from staff. Buffy was about to say as much, but Oz kept walking, beckoning her to follow, and led her up a stairwell and through a door she hadn't noticed the first time she had been here.

The smaller space they entered upstairs appeared to be another club, entirely distinct from the main floor, but Buffy couldn't spare a second to observe it when she saw that Nina was already there waiting for them, and that she was accompanied by someone completely unexpected.

Oz seemed as surprised as she was, but he recovered first and said, "Mr. Wolfe. Hi."

Buffy greeted them with wary courtesy. Damien Wolfe was sitting in one of the leather armchairs, dressed in what looked like another designer suit jacket, and he appeared just as irate and intimidating as he had the night he had kicked them out of Satellite 3. Nina was standing, closer to the entrance than he was, with her arms crossed and a mean-spirited smirk on her face. There was no bartender or anyone else in the room. Buffy swallowed. "Where's Eric?"

"Mr. E," said Nina, emphasizing the stage name, "was not invited."

"Okay," said Oz. "Seems like there's a few things we'll have to clear up."

Nobody else moved toward the seating. "Completely agreed," said Nina smoothly. "Oz, Buffy, I think you guys have gotten the wrong idea from somewhere. I've had to keep some secrets, yeah. Most people wouldn't be able to understand if I explained it right now. And I think we can all relate to that," she added, raising her eyebrows at each of them in turn.

"Damn straight," Buffy responded before anyone else could. "Look, I'm coming clean with our secret right now: we came to Cleveland because we heard about people being infected by an evil spirit. It's happened to you, Nina. Whatever you've been hiding - you don't need to tell us, just please consider it wasn't your own idea. And it's not your fault."

"My _fault?_ " Nina laughed. "Of course not. No more than it's yours that you're the Slayer. Or Angel's that he has a soul. It's destiny. I know exactly what I'm doing, and I know it's right."

Oz cleared his throat. "Then why not tell Eric?"

"And why is _he_ here instead?" Buffy added, flicking a hand in Wolfe's direction.

Wolfe spoke at last, and his voice was tinged with a growling quality that sounded permanent. "You have a man held captive in your home. John Howell. I want him."

"I'm not holding anyone captive," said Oz.

Nina scoffed. "Sure, honey. Keep him, if you care that much. And hey," she went on, "tell my boyfriend anything you want. What's he going to do? Rally the troops and attack me?"

She was right, Buffy realized suddenly. Oz's allegiance to his pack might be in the process of changing this very minute, but Mr. E would never take their side against Nina based solely on something he hadn't seen with his own eyes. The Wolf's strategy went beyond his ritual and invasion of human bodies. "Nina," Buffy urged softly, "you need help."

"I'll get it," Nina replied with iron certainty. "Believe me."

Wolfe had finally stood up; now he turned and walked behind the little stage over the bar, and Nina followed. She was wearing a halter top, and the lunar cycle tattoo on her back stood out like a warning.

As they both exited the room through a plain black door that clicked shut behind them, Buffy heard Oz mutter a curse through the hand he had at his face, stroking his stubble.

"What?" she asked.

He was staring at the door as if he could see through it. "Satellite 1," he said. "Nobody ever goes in there. All those times they said the boss was having a meeting...it must have been with her. Wolfe and Nina."

Buffy considered that. "I have to talk to Angel."

"Let's go."

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Angel had called hours before he should be awake, and Faith didn't waste time asking about why he needed her. She entered Oz's house to find Angel alone and bleeding, and looking more abashed about it than scared or angry. "The hell is this?" she asked.

He was rummaging through a first aid kit, and she took it from him and found the rest of what she needed in the kitchen and bathroom. As she cleaned his wounds - mostly shallow ones, thankfully, though he was decorated with a few ugly bruises too - he explained that he'd been sleeping when the intruders came in, and that they had used their numbers, and the sunlight, to their advantage. "Plus I didn't want to hurt them," he added, which made more sense when he told her who they were.

As Faith dabbed at a cut in his chest, he winced, and she looked up to roll her eyes at him. "Come on, it doesn't sting that bad."

"It's not that. I'm just not ready to explain this to Buffy, and she's at the door." He pulled on a shirt, then touched his face. "Is this still visible?"

"Your lip is split wide open, dumbass." Faith closed up the kit and went out to meet Buffy and Oz, and Angel, apparently resigned to his fate, followed.

"Angel, we've got a situation with Nina, we need to - oh hi Faith, what are you doing here?" Buffy didn't give her time to reply; she had just seen Angel, and her reaction was probably just what he had feared. "Oh my God, what have you been _doing?_ We've only been gone for like an hour!" She rushed over and put her fingers lightly to his cheek, and he smiled and pressed her hand there with his own.

"He can't hog all the blame," said Faith wearily, washing her hands in the kitchen sink. "Bunch of pups busted in, went for Howell."

"Howell?" asked Oz. "Is he okay?"

Angel took up the explanation himself. "He's not hurt but he's not here. I think they thought they were doing a jailbreak. Didn't give him a chance to say his piece, and I guess he just got swept up in it and left with them." He sighed. "I'm sorry, Oz. I would have put up a better defense of your home, but I didn't think you would want me using force against your pack."

Oz nodded pensively and turned back to the door, but only to inspect the knob. "They didn't break in. They had a key. Means Jordan was with them."

Jordan was Oz's cousin, though Faith knew Angel wouldn't have recognized him by sight or smell. She grimaced, and saw her own sympathy mirrored on Buffy's and Angel's faces. Oz had dealt with enough already without his own family turning on him. "The hysteria in town over werewolves," Angel suggested. "It must be hard on the young ones."

"How would they even know about Howell, though?" Faith asked. "Who do they think he is?"

Buffy was leaning back against Angel, but now she stiffened with a sudden thought. "They don't know," she said. "Someone sent them. Someone who's gathering support from the Cleveland werewolves."

In a startling display of anger, Oz's fist pounded into the door. Over the next ten minutes, he and Buffy shared a disturbing story of their meeting with Nina, one which all but confirmed that she was the Wolf. Faith could barely process the idea. Since she had moved to Cleveland, Nina had become one of her best friends. They hadn't seen each other as much now that they were both involved in complicated romantic relationships, but Faith felt that if something this horribly, horribly wrong had been happening, she should have _known_.

"What now?" she asked as they all sat down together and Buffy fussed over Angel's shrinking injuries.

Buffy was first to answer, her voice hard. "We grill."

"Grill whom?" Angel replied around the icepack that she had insisted he hold to his lip.

"Burgers," she said. "Hotdogs. We have to go to Nina's cookout tomorrow, like we planned. It's the only way to see if she's up to anything while she's transformed. Faith, have they invited you?"

Faith gave a bitter laugh that wasn't altogether voluntary. "I'm bringing a fruit salad."

Buffy's eyes widened. "Oh no, I didn't think of that." She looked at Angel. "Should we bring something too?"

"We can pick up some bottled drinks," he assured her, then resumed a business tone. "You two should go together. Spike and I will come after dark and take a walk around the enclosures to check things out from the ground. Act normal, but keep your eyes open. We need to find out who would stay loyal to Nina if it came to that."

"You mean like her boyfriend?" said Oz. His voice betrayed no emotion, but Faith sensed sarcasm. Then he added something that got everyone's attention: "Or like me?"

Angel gave him a long look, kneading the icepack in his hands. "I know this is personal for you," he said. "It is for me too. We have to figure out how to keep everyone out of danger, but we have to do it without fooling ourselves about what the infected people have become."

Oz lowered his gaze. "I get that. Not everyone will." He stood up. "I'll talk to E."

"I'll do some research on Satellite 3," said Buffy. "Maybe I can find some stats on Damien Wolfe, or there's something special about the building itself."

"I'll help," said Angel, and the two of them smiled at each other.

Faith was reminded of the Scooby Gang, divvying up jobs at the end of a meeting. It wasn't nostalgic; mostly she had to wonder if they had always been as flippant about mortal danger as they were now, as they had been during the brief period that she was one of them. She got to her feet. "I'll go buy fruit."

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The Fourth of July was hot, starting early in the day. Oz was the first to arrive at Eric and Nina's house, thinking to help them prepare for the party, but he found it more difficult than anticipated. So, it seemed, did Eric. As soon as either of them had started on a task, Nina would take a look and stop them with some kind of criticism: "That's not how they should be chopped" or "I thought I told you I'd do that myself" or "It's probably more helpful if you just stay out of the way." Each time, she would laugh as if it were a joke, but she still didn't allow them to lend much of a hand.

When Oz had moved to Cleveland, the first people he had contacted were family: his aunt and uncle and two cousins, all of them werewolves. Aunt Maureen had personally introduced him to a tattoo artist they knew who was active in the local pack, not realizing at the time that the artist's girlfriend had dated Angel and was friends with Faith. As Oz discovered the connections, Mr. E and Nina built on them, and before a year had passed they were appointed Cleveland's alphas. If not for them, Oz knew, he probably would have moved on at some point, instead of coming to think of this place as home.

For everyone's sake, he was worried about what was happening, but it especially hurt to witness the strain on Eric and Nina's relationship. Eric didn't raise an argument at any point, but the rapport they'd had as a couple was gone, and he kept casting embarrassed smiles toward Oz.

Before long, Oz and Eric were in an implied exile on the back porch, eating chips and waiting for guests to arrive. It was hard to know for sure if Nina was listening, so Oz was trying to avoid bringing up anything related to the Wolf, but Eric seemed to think that she wasn't. "I told Buffy and Angel about how Nina hasn't seemed like herself lately," he confessed. "Now I can't stop wondering if it's just me."

Oz would have dodged the topic, but it didn't seem right to let Eric go on like this, sounding so crestfallen. "It's not just you."

"Everyone else's relationships look so solid, in comparison. Like they know exactly who they are and where they're going. Spike and Angel," he said, as if holding up an example.

"They're not actually together…"

Eric laughed. "No, I was going to say, they're the only two vampires with souls, right?" At Oz's nod, he continued, "And they're both dating vampire Slayers. That's whacked. That's the kind of couple shouldn't last five seconds, and there's two of them coming tonight. Compared to that…" He shook his head. "Werewolf and a werewolf ought to be a piece of cake."

"Nobody's really got it together," said Oz. "Believe me."

Eric raised an eyebrow and crunched another potato chip. "So how about you? There's a couple girls in the pack asking me to find out why you never date. Cute ones."

Oz leaned back in his deck chair, eyes pointing at the blue sky. "I date."

"Oh yeah? Who and when?"

"I...used to date," he amended. "I've been talking to my ex lately. Kinda puts me off the scene." Willow looked more exhausted and careworn every time she sent an astral projection to Cleveland. If they were dating, maybe he could tell her to stop, but he still wondered if she would listen.

Nina's voice became audible inside, along with that of a new arrival and the sound of doors opening and dishes being set down. Oz turned and stood as Aunt Maureen came gliding through the open glass doors to the porch. He accepted her hug as Uncle Ken emerged, and then, lingering behind them a little, ten-year-old Kristina. "Where's Jordan?" Oz asked.

Maureen sighed dramatically. "He'll be coming with his friends. I suppose we're not cool enough for him anymore."

"I hope he's bringing his bass," said Eric. "Oz tells me he's not half bad. I thought we could have a jam session."

"Yep," Uncle Ken affirmed, but the word was clipped and flat, as if the subject troubled him. Oz had a feeling of foreboding which had been gradually increasing since he arrived. He hadn't planned to confront Jordan about attacking Angel, but he at least wanted to talk to him face to face to see if anything felt wrong. If his own parents had some kind of concern about him, the question was probably already answered.

Buffy and Faith were the next to show up, Buffy carrying enough wine coolers to prove she had Slayer strength, Faith with a large bowl of haphazardly chopped fruit. Both seemed slightly uncertain about their offerings, but Eric welcomed them warmly and introduced them to the Godfreys, and Oz could sense his relief at finally having a chance to be the host at his own party.

Oz tried to relax, too. As more guests arrived, he went for his guitar, but Buffy followed him to his car and started talking business as soon as they were out of earshot for those in the house. "Check this out," she said, laying out a few pieces of paper on the hood of the car. "Floor plans for Satellite 3."

Interested in spite of his reservations, Oz leaned over and inspected them with her. "Are you sure this is accurate? I can't tell what this big space is supposed to be."

"We don't know either," she said. "From the outside, it looks like it's part of the connected building on Main Street. But look at this." She took a pen from her purse and circled the door that was shown in one of the rooms, which had been marked 'S2'. "This is the door you pointed out in Satellite 2, right? And it lines up to the big empty mysterious space. I know this isn't much to go on, but…"

"It's plenty." Without saying another word, Oz took the pen from her and drew a rough Fibonacci spiral onto the page. The line went through the main part of the club, then Satellite 2, crossing the doorway she had marked, and the remainder of the spiral curled up within the big room. Oz dropped the pen when he finished, feeling cornered within the graphical walls, and it rolled down the hood and fell to the pavement without either of them attempting to stop it.

Buffy smoothed out one of the other printouts, this one showing Satellite 3's location in the downtown neighborhood. The spiral had already been drawn on this one, and it was easy to see how the center would look just like Oz's drawing if magnified. "Wow." Buffy's voice was hushed. "That big space isn't a warehouse, is it?"

"Why not?" Oz replied. "Makes about as much sense as a high school library."

She winced. "Good point. I better go show Faith."

"Maybe that can wait. There's already a lot of suspicion in the air." Oz moved around the car and got the guitar case out of the trunk. Nearer to the house, there were a few cars more than there had been when they'd gone outside, but he couldn't tell if any of them might have carried Jordan here.

Buffy was looking at him with a quizzical expression. "Don't you want to work on this while we can? I know you're booked up after sunset, and we've got another murder on the schedule coming up soon…"

"This isn't the place." He shut the trunk and started back toward the house with the guitar, and after a second he heard Buffy following.

The party was in full swing when they returned to the house, centered mostly on the back porch and the chairs that had been set out in the yard. Oz instinctively looked for Nina first, and found her pouring drinks while talking to Faith. He noticed that some of the others on the porch were looking askance at the two Slayers, the only ones there who weren't lycanthropes. He mentally berated himself; someone should have been making introductions and assuring the pack that it was safe to talk freely around Faith and Buffy. Of course, that someone probably should have been Nina.

Jordan was down on the grass, his bass guitar slung over his back, setting up a place to sit with another young musician and Eric. A weight lifted from Oz's mind, and he headed that way to meet them, not stopping to find out if Buffy was about to show Faith the Satellite 3 floor plan.

When he saw him, Jordan's neck turned red, and he turned away, tugging bashfully at his forelock. "Uhh. Hey." Eric immediately petitioned the other boy for help with something else, effectively granting some privacy to the impending conversation.

"Hey," Oz replied, placing his guitar on one of the chairs and seating himself in another.

"'M sorry 'bout yesterday," Jordan mumbled in a rush. Reluctantly, he put down his own instrument and sat down.

Oz nodded. "Angel's alright."

"Good," said Jordan, and he sounded like he meant it.

"Where's Howell? Didn't want to come?"

Jordan shrugged uncomfortably. "He got mad when he found out you didn't send us. Kinda stormed off. Was acting kinda weird actually."

That wasn't good. Oz hadn't really thought that Howell needed to be locked up in the first place, but that had come with the assumption that someone would at least know where he was. There was a fair chance that Howell would head right back to Oz's house, but nobody was going to be there all night. "Was this whole thing Nina's idea?" he asked, taking care to keep his tone neutral.

"Yeah." Jordan glanced toward the house, his brow furrowed. "Is something going on with her? I mean, we figured if she was telling us something it was legit. She's an _alpha,_ " he added, with a kind of reverence unique to born werewolves.

"I don't know," said Oz. "I'm trying to find out. You guys want to get started without me?" He gestured at the guitars.

Jordan nodded and pulled his bass into his lap. "Uh. Can you not tell my folks about what happened?"

Oz clasped his hand firmly and looked him in the eye, and Jordan's posture relaxed. The other musicians returned to the circle of chairs, and partygoers gathered to listen to them as Oz went to find Buffy and Faith.

Fortunately, they were together, and Nina was no longer with them. Both were inside near the food table, arguing about something that didn't seem to have anything to do with the Wolf. "It's good!" Buffy insisted after swallowing, with apparent difficulty, a spoonful of something from the bowl she was holding. "Look, I'm eating a whole bowl of it! All I'm saying is you should peel the kiwis first!"

"Whatever," Faith huffed. "I'm not a fruit ninja, okay?"

Oz decided to change the subject for them before anyone made him choose a side. "Howell's missing. Can you call Angel, see if he showed up there?"

Buffy put her bowl down with a clatter and whipped out her cell phone. She turned away from them as she dialed, and Faith said to Oz, "You want me to go out looking for him?"

He shook his head. "How? You haven't met the guy."

"Buffy can, then."

"She doesn't know her way around town," Oz objected, increasingly frustrated.

"Okay, then we wait for dark and send Spike and Angel," Faith bargained, at the same time that Buffy turned back around, putting her phone back into her pocket and shaking her head.

She gave them each a wary glance. "We're sending the boys where? I missed something."

"No," said Oz. "It can't wait that long. I'll go myself. If I don't find him by sunset, I'll call you before I lock up to change."

Faith looked uncertain, but Buffy responded with surprising vehemence. "You're just going to split in the middle of this shebang after telling _me_ you don't want to work the mission here? You're our strongest link to the pack, and," her voice lowered to a hiss, "Nina's watching! She's going to notice!"

He didn't have to do anything conspicuous to know she was right. "Well, what do you want to do?" he asked.

Buffy hesitated for a moment, then said, "I'll call Willow. She can-"

" _No._ " Oz wondered offhandedly if he should start counting how many times he'd had to say that since Buffy and Angel showed up. "Did you not twig how worn out she is? If you keep piling on these astral stints she's going to tear herself apart trying not to go dark on us again. Let her be."

He could sense the sudden change in Buffy's mood, though he had long since stopped differentiating between the scents, visual cues, and intuition he used in reading people. She seemed to draw back as if ready to pounce, then sucked in a breath and began, "How dare you..."

"Hey," Faith cut in sharply. "Guys, for real? The king of non-reaction and the Friendship-Is-Power spokeswoman are gonna make _me_ step up as the peacemaker?"

Oz raised an eyebrow at her, unfazed, but Buffy looked abashed. "It's just...I'm used to, you know, having a system. In LA, the Slayers all work together. We give them their assignments, but if things get rough, everyone pitches in even if it costs them a little extra. And Willow's part of that team."

"And we're not?" said Faith. Her voice was dry, but she didn't seem as interested in mediating as she had a moment ago.

"There's no team," Oz informed both of them, "so no one has to be."

Buffy busied herself pouring from a bottle of diet soda. "Faith, you and I should both go. You drive, I recognize, nobody marks _us_ absent."

"Go where?"

The girls froze as they looked up. Oz didn't; he had noticed Nina's approach in advance, although not soon enough to warn the others. He could tell that Buffy was about to stammer out an implausible lie, so he cut her off and answered Nina himself: "Angel's staying at my place. Stuck there right now, obviously. All the blood he brought along got spoiled and Faith may have to take Buffy to get more. Butcher's gonna be closed tomorrow."

There was a pause, in which Buffy and Faith did their best to support the story by shrugging and nodding. Oz didn't think that Nina seemed skeptical, but she didn't look surprised, either. "Okay," she sighed. "I mean, I guess you aren't having fun anyway."

"What do you mean?" Buffy replied, too quickly. "Fun? We're having that. This is fun."

Nina's eyes rolled upward. "Well, you've spent the whole time since you got here just talking to each other indoors. And no offense or anything, but you know this is the first time any non-werewolves have been invited to this party? I told them all you were worth making an exception. Some of them were pretty interested in meeting you. But, you know, whatever."

Faith looked aghast. "Dude, Nina. We just had to square this one thing, totally did not mean to go antisocial on you."

"I was just getting a soda," said Buffy, holding up her plastic cup of evidence. "Got distracted for a moment, that's all."

Oz looked at the three of them, caught Nina's eye, and nodded. "I'll go run that errand for Angel. Back before the moon."

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Angel could hear wolves as he drove up the hill, howling from the approximate locations that Mr. E had pointed out as the enclosures they used. He still had the feeling that something was wrong - not in a way that made him want to panic or run to the rescue, just a weight in his chest that served as an extra motivation to return to Buffy.

He couldn't see her from the yard, but he easily found the ladder to the roof, and could smell her by the time he had silently ascended. He called her name in a low voice, just once, and her face appeared from around the corner of the second-story wall she had been leaning against. Angel made his way across the sloping part of the roof to settle down beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and scanning the neighborhood around the house.

"Can you see them?" she asked, the first words she had spoken.

The two closest werewolves, Nina and Mr. E, weren't immediately visible. Angel could hear them, but the only way he knew that it was them and not two others was because the growls were coming from within the boundaries of their personal fenced yard. He thought that he could learn to recognize the individual voices of wolves, with practice, but he hadn't spent too many full moons around any of them, even Nina.

To answer Buffy, he pointed in their direction, and she nodded. Then he pointed outward and straight ahead, to another, more distant enclosure. There were at least ten wolves there, but even with his night vision he could only see them as darting shadows, so he doubted she could see anything at all. There was one more area where Mr. E had told them to look, down the hill on the west side, and he found three more wolves there and pointed again. "Looks like this is all in order," he concluded.

"A place for everyone and everyone in their place," she agreed. She rubbed her arms absently, and Angel took his coat off to drape over her. He still thought there was something troubling her, but he wasn't sure how to ask about it.

She didn't make him wonder for long. "I got into a spat with Oz."

"Huh." Sympathetic but genuinely curious, he asked, "How is that even possible?"

Buffy chuckled sadly. "He really belongs to this place now. Like Nina and Mr. E, at least until the Wolf business. And it's not just the pack bond thing. Faith and Spike have it too. I've never felt so...incidental."

"It was your dream that brought us here," he reminded her.

"I know. I still think we have a job to do. But I keep trying to do it my way, and my way kind of hinges on a small group of talented misfits functioning together like a well-oiled machine."

"Well, we've got the misfits..."

"And the talent. Just not the oil." Buffy sighed and pulled his coat tighter around herself. "How's Spike?"

Angel shrugged. "Fine. I dropped him off with Faith so they can keep looking for Howell. How was the party?"

She hesitated, but then responded, "Good burgers."

"Get anywhere with Nina?"

"Um...good burgers."

He had hoped for some new insight on the Wolf, but Buffy hadn't planned anything more than reconnaissance at the party anyway. She showed him the spiral that Oz had drawn on the Satellite 3 floor plan, and they traded a few theories before being interrupted by a hiss and bang coming from the sky. "You know, I'd forgotten all about the fireworks," Buffy murmured, and that was the last thing that either of them said for some time.

The view from the rooftop was perfect; distant but without obstruction or any crowd save for the wolfpack. Angel had seen firework displays, plenty of them, but he had never watched them with Buffy, and it occurred to him suddenly that it was okay to enjoy this moment. He kissed her head as a spray of golden sparks exploded overhead, and she snuggled close and made a soft sound of delight when three more rockets blossomed, each in a different color. Between every thunderous crash, they could hear the wolves singing, conveying a kind of childlike excitement to the lightshow.

Before long, Angel began turning his attention to them instead of the sky. Nina and Eric had come out from their cover, and they were close enough to see by the moon's illumination even when the frequency of the fireworks slackened off. He could easily tell which one was which - Eric's species, which he claimed to share with the majority of the pack, was colloquially known as "Chippewa Grey", and there were a few visible differences between him and Nina's _Lycanthropus Exterus_. He had thicker fur, a shorter snout, and broad humanoid shoulders. Although they were about the same size, Nina walked on her hind paws exclusively, while Eric would periodically drop down to all fours to rest or run in a manner that reminded Angel vaguely of a great ape.

More intriguing than their respective appearances was their behavior. Angel had the impression that Eric was trying to coax his mate into frolicking with him, but whenever he came too close, she would snap at him and snarl. They never broke into a real fight, but it was hard not to sympathize with Eric as his flirtations were rejected again and again. Angel remembered leaving Nina in Cleveland, her confident smile as she told him that she was where she was meant to be. He imagined the freedom she must have felt when she was first given a place to run with other lycanthropes during the full moon. He wondered if Eric would remember any part of this when he woke up human.

"The aggressive one is Nina, isn't it?" said Buffy as the last few fireworks died, leaving only smoke and echoes behind.

"Yeah," Angel answered, glad that he wouldn't have to explain it to her. "And I don't think she's acting like herself now, either."

Buffy subvocalized her agreement, then said, "It doesn't look like she's trying to escape, though." She was right - both wolves had been ignoring the visitors on their rooftop, as well as the fireworks and everything else outside their pen.

"I don't think she'd have to. If it's true she's been present at the deaths so far, she must have gotten there as a human first. And I'd bet the Wolf infection allows her to transform at will, if she hadn't mastered it on her own already."

"I wonder what's going on in her head." Buffy's voice was low and pensive, her two hands holding one of his like a gift. "Ever since Giles told us about the toxoplasma, I can't stop picturing it. Imagine some garden-variety rat, no clue that it's even sick, suddenly deciding cats are the in crowd...just sidling up to them all 'Hey, I've been wrong about you feline types.' And then getting disemboweled, all because some microscopic dictator in its blood had its own plan."

Angel answered in the same quiet tone. "Imagine if the virus really could make its own plans. Imagine if the cats were in on it."

"And the victim," Buffy finished, "was too intelligent to go along with these impulses unless she made up reasons to convince herself it was what she wanted."

There was a long silence, made eerie by the wolves' apparent participation in it. The sky had grown blacker, the moon brighter, and Eric had settled down with a long bone, leaving Nina to pace the length of the enclosure by herself. Angel fixed his eyes forward and spoke in an unwavering voice: "I'm not going to kill her."

"Angel?" Buffy sounded concerned. "I didn't say…"

"You didn't have to. Nobody had to. We all knew what this was going to lead us into. Willow said there's no cure. Giles said it would be a mercy to release the Wolf's host. Now we know it's Nina, and nobody can come out and admit that the rules haven't changed just because she's a friend." He felt Buffy flinch, and hung his head. "I'm sorry. I probably sound angry...I'm not. Not at you, anyway. I just know there's going to be someone thinking this is my job, since nobody else wants to do it. And I won't. I can't."

Her answer came reluctantly, though her hands didn't move from his. "It's funny. I...I haven't been thinking that at all. For me it's just been, 'How are we going to get this done without taking an innocent life?' The part of my brain that knows we can't, it's like it's password protected. But I think you just logged in."

Hopeless as he was, he couldn't help appreciating that Buffy had known that a computer analogy would no longer throw him off. "The part that really scares me," he confided, "is that I still kind of believe that it _is_ my job. If this is something that has to happen, the consequences for it ought to go to the one who's already doomed anyway, right?"

"No!" Without warning, she swung a leg over his, straddling him so that they were eye to eye, and held him by the shoulders. "Angel, you're not doomed. You're a warrior, like me. You can't come this far just to throw it away." She slumped down a bit, changing her grip to an embrace. "A couple days from now, we'll save a life. Maybe we'll learn something that helps. Maybe there really is a way out of this, and we just haven't seen it yet. But we're in it together, remember? I'm not going to just throw you to the wo- ugh. I swear that was not on purpose."

Angel slipped his arms around the small of her back, then cradled her head so that he could support her even as she leaned in the direction of the roof's decline. He kissed her hard and passionately, and after a single second of surprise, she returned it, her tongue in his mouth and her warm fingers on his face and neck.

It wasn't the first time they had kissed since coming back together, but it felt new, and a little frightening. Angel knew that they were in no danger of losing their senses and making love on his ex-girlfriend's roof in full view of a pair of werewolves, but he couldn't know for sure if this was the first step toward a mutual desire that they could only contain for so long. For now, all he could do was hope, and stand firm, and kiss.

"Hey," whispered Buffy, long minutes later. "Happy Independence Day."

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Faith gave another glance to the print-out map she had been carrying in her pocket, then folded it back up and checked the time. The Wolf's next killing was scheduled for 7:15am, so she and Buffy had come early to scope out the location where Willow had advised it would happen. Fortunately, there was no private residence within a thirty-foot radius, which was supposed to be the maximum distance that would work for the ritual. The spot was outdoors, in a patio adjacent to a commercial plaza. Faith had just done a headcount in the one restaurant which had unlocked its doors, and Buffy had disappeared into an indoor shopping center with the same purpose.

Something was going on with Buffy, Faith thought. Angel too, although she hadn't seen him since the night before last, and Spike's perspective on it hadn't been much help. They were probably just stressed out by the mission, but they were supposed to be professionals.

Faith turned to circumnavigate the zone again, and was stopped short by the appearance of a familiar face she hadn't been expecting here. "Oz," she greeted him. "Hey. Are you here for...?" There was another man with him, a stranger, and she wasn't sure about how freely she should speak.

"Yeah," said Oz, then indicated his companion. "This is John Howell. He knew this was the spot, so we decided to check it out with you."

"Oh!" Everything clicked into place. "You found him."

It was Howell who answered. "I found him. Got away from the brainsucker influence before any real damage was done. You're the Slayer?"

"I'm a Slayer. What do you mean 'real damage'?" Faith heard a door close, and looked over her shoulder to see Buffy approaching with a wave and a nod.

"Something's telling me to fly away," Howell said gravely. "Something else is telling me to wreak havoc, all glory to the Wolf. Another something else just wants to help you guys as much as I can, to save Cleveland. Since the pull is pretty much equal in every direction, I figure I get to choose."

Buffy had reached them just in time to respond to Howell's self-analysis. "Smart move. I'm glad to see you're okay."

"So the gang's all here," said Faith. "Except for the ones who can't do the sunshine thing. And the ones who, y'know, might be the actual killers."

Buffy nodded. "We'll see her coming. The front and side doors are the only ways to get into that restaurant, right?"

"Right," said Faith. "And she's not in there right now. What about the stores inside?"

"None are open and only one has anyone in there. It's a sheet music store with this little old guy who looks like he hasn't had a customer since cassette tapes were invented." She paused thoughtfully. "Really makes it kind of inspirational that he's the first one up and ready in the morning."

Faith nodded. This was good - there might not be a fight, but either way, they would want to be out in the open to see Nina coming. If it was even Nina. Maybe it was stupid to still be holding onto the hope that her friend was going to be okay, but she wouldn't let it affect her judgment.

Buffy frowned at a car that was zooming by. "This is the first location in the golden spiral that's in a public space in almost-broad daylight. Is she going to compensate for that somehow, or does anyone who happens to be taking an early morning walk get the big reveal?"

Oz coughed. "Why don't you ask her?"

Faith, Buffy, and Howell all whirled around. Nina was approaching at a relaxed amble, sunglasses perched on her head and a purse slung over her shoulder. Her gait paused when she saw them, and she held up her hands in mock surprise. "Hello, everyone. What are you doing here?"

"We were going for breakfast," said Faith, indicating the restaurant and swallowing a nervous laugh. "You?"

It seemed ridiculous to fake a normal conversation when every single person here knew exactly what was going on, but Nina sounded so natural that it put doubts in her head all over again. "Shopping. Mr. E wants some songbooks. He's really serious about this idea of getting a band together." She smiled, a patronizing expression. "Well, I'll leave you to your 24-hour diner food. Really hits the spot at 7:17 in the morning, doesn't it?"

The implication sank in all at once, and Faith saw the color draining from Buffy's face at the same moment that she felt it in her own. She looked at her watch, too automatically to fight the impulse. Nina was right: it was 7:17am. Two minutes after the death was supposed to take place.

Oz ran into the diner, Buffy and Faith lunged for Nina, and Howell reeled backward, hand to his face, saying, "Oh God, of course. Why do I only know it now?"

"Take it easy," Nina chided them, not bothering to struggle or even feign surprise as the Slayers each grabbed one of her arms. "Look around you. Is this a crime scene?" She waited until their uncertainty had loosened their grip, then said, "Now let me go get my boyfriend's present."

Oz reemerged, shaking his head in consternation. "What is it?" he asked Howell, who was still distraught.

"Music shop," the pilot said hoarsely. "We ought to escort her."

All four of them did, letting Nina lead the way through the building's main entrance and under a sign reading All Harmony Music. A string of bells on the shop's narrow wooden door rang out as it swung open, but instead of the peaceful scent of books, an odor of fresh blood hit Faith's nose.

Nina screamed, as convincingly as if it had been authentic. Everyone pushed their way in and fanned out to see the body on the floor, an aged shopkeeper in an old-fashioned vest, lying in a pool of blood. Buffy rushed over, but there was no hope: his forearms had each been deeply slashed from wrist to elbow with a bloody pocketknife that had fallen by his head.

"A suicide?" said Oz, aghast.

"Sure," Nina chuckled, all traces of horror gone from her voice. "Let's go with that."

Faith saw the pieces come together, and spoke them out loud, facing Nina. "They were all suicides, weren't they? You just paid them a visit afterward to obscure the evidence." The full magnitude of it hit her. " _You_ were pinning it on werewolves! Your own pack!"

Nina shrugged. "This one won't look like werewolves. Unless you'd all like to step outside for a moment so I can change. No? Alright then. Does anyone want to call the cops, or should I?"

"They're coming," said Buffy, her phone in her hand and her voice just above a whisper, but full of restrained rage. "And you're coming with us."

Footsteps came pounding up to the shop's entrance, and Nina said, "I don't think so," just before it opened. They turned to see, not the police, but Mr. E, his face white and breath rapid.

Nina flung herself into his arms, sobbing. "Oh, Eric. This poor old man. It's just too horrible."

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Cleveland was in chaos. The first responders who had arrived at the scene of the shopkeeper's death could see the evidence that it had been a suicide, but there was no easy explanation for why there were six people already there, thirty minutes before the shop was due to open. They were saved from immediate suspicion thanks to Faith's familiarity with the local law enforcement, but everyone had been questioned as a witness - including Nina.

So far, Buffy had heard nothing about the consequences of that interview, but reactions from all over town were spreading through word of mouth and the internet. The people of Cleveland didn't need math equations to know that the murders were coming faster, and they didn't need to know it was an occult ritual to be afraid. Buffy had spent most of the day holed up in Oz's house with Angel, taking calls from the police department and waiting for calls from Eric or Howell, which did not come.

Nobody could quite recall when they had last seen Howell, so he must have slipped away after making his statement at the police station, or he was still being held there. Buffy was almost more concerned about him than she was about Nina. The man was clearly losing his grip, and there were too many ways that the Wolf could use him now, to ruinous effect.

Eric, of course, had left with Nina. Buffy was anxious to know more about where he now stood with her, but Oz had turned down her suggestion to go and speak with him in person. His top priority, he said, was the pack. Early in the afternoon, he had left the house to visit with his people, and he hadn't been back since.

"The question is," said Buffy, handing Angel a fresh cup of coffee, "what's he talking to them about? Is this a 'rally the troops' thing, or is he doing some private investigation of his own?"

Angel swiveled in his chair to accept the mug from her. "I think it's more a matter of checking up on them, seeing if they're okay. With their alphas incommunicado, they'll want some sign of leadership, and Oz seems to be pretty well respected in the pack."

"Huh." Buffy sat down in her adjacent chair, set there so that they could both see Oz's computer monitor. "I wish that didn't make me start wondering about his loyalties again. Are all of us becoming as paranoid as I am, or am I just paranoid enough to make it seem that way?"

It was rhetorical, of course, but his gravely-spoken response surprised her. "I'm not sure we're being paranoid _enough_."

"What's that mean?"

"This morning you figured out that the murders were suicides, right? That means that every single one of them was infected by the Wolf and forced to act against the strongest human instinct that there is, and they had nothing in common aside from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What are the limits? Is there anyone the Wolf _can't_ touch?"

Buffy sucked in a sharp breath. "I...I don't know. But if it were one of us - we would know. Howell said he could tell he wasn't himself, and he didn't keep it secret from us. He cooperated. We would do the same."

"If we understood what was happening," Angel insisted. "Even for Howell it was a fine line. He knew he didn't want to fly us to Cleveland, but he convinced himself he did before he even questioned it. If the impulse were a little more subtle, then who knows?"

Resisting her fervent desire to react with more denial, Buffy forced herself to think critically. "If you were the Wolf and you had the Scooby Gang extended edition at your disposal, what would you do with us?"

"Prevent us from interfering with the spiral," Angel began, "but I'm not sure what that would entail, aside from keeping us away from the murder sites."

"Okay, we're already planning to be at each site on schedule, so now we know that backing out of that is a red flag. Good. What else?"

"I would get my pieces set up. Make sure that there would be a victim available at the time and place they were needed."

"And he's already got the owner of Satellite 3 under his control. We can probably expect him to lure in a crowd and then trap them all inside, so we'll need to look out for anyone who has a burning need to go have a drink." An idea hit her as soon as the words were out, and she grabbed Angel's arm for emphasis. "Wait. What if nobody could get a drink that day at all? What if the bar had to close?"

He picked up the thread instantly. "What would force them to close? Damages, maybe?"

"There wouldn't be enough time to vandalize past the point of no return. How about planting something in there that brings Food Safety down on them?"

Angel considered, then shook his head. "Too many variables. For all we know, the health inspector is Wolf-infected."

He pushed back the chair and stood up, pacing the small room while taking meditative sips from his coffee cup. Buffy remained sitting, but followed him with her eyes. It still sometimes fascinated her to observe him, never mind the years that had passed since she discovered what he was, and how they had wrought no visible changes. Once she recognized a vampire, she couldn't unsee it - that was true for all of them, but Angel had such a predatory way of moving that she wondered how she had ever mistaken him for anything else. Even as she admired the view, her instincts were giving her unsolicited instructions on how to best dodge his next attack.

Suddenly she had it. "We can stage a vampire attack. You know how the room clears whenever there's a bumpy face in sight. You and Spike chase all the civilians away, I'll play victim, the three of us stay hiding in there so everyone's afraid to come back."

Angel's face went from surprise to a broad grin. "And if they want to get rid of us, they'll have to enlist Cleveland's best Slayer."

"Right! Faith can come in to help us, Oz can keep watch from outside, and then all we have to do is hold down Nina when the time comes, and not die."

"And I'll be in there already when the sun rises, so I won't have to wait til dark to join you. I was worrying about that."

Buffy bounced to her feet and put her arms around his neck to give him a quick kiss. "I told you we were going to figure something out. Let me call Faith."

The phone rang in her hand, and she put it to her ear without looking at the name. "Hey Faith," she began, then realized that it might be the police instead, or Eric, or Howell. "Um, sorry, I mean...hello?"

"Hi Buff," came the small but kind voice on the other end.

Buffy glanced up at Angel, who had heard the voice as well, and he shrugged slightly to show her that it confused him too. "Will," she said to the phone. "You're calling me. On a phone."

"I had to cool it with the astral projection. My actual body was starting to flicker. Can you get me any kind of information you have on Nina?"

Angel frowned, and Buffy held up the phone so he could be heard: "Like what?"

"Is that Angel? Hey. Like Wolfram & Hart files, art she's made, any personal details you remember...quantity over quality. This is a long shot in the first place but if I can fudge knowing her intimately, it might work." She paused. "I mean, not _intimately_ , her being involved and all..."

"We get the picture," said Buffy. "Are you sure it's a good idea to be spellcasting at all? I don't like when my Willow flickers."

"I'll take care. We're down to the wire, Buff. It's gotta be all in from now on."

After the conversation had concluded, Buffy stood still for a moment, her brow furrowed, feeling as if there was a question she should have asked. "Well," she said to Angel, who had no more insight than she did, "I'm glad she's got her resolve on, anyway."

//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Barely a word had been exchanged since Oz and Eric had gotten into the car, and nothing was said now that they were parked at the private airport. Eric stepped out of the driver's seat, looking around the quiet lot for signs of life; Oz knew where they were headed and began walking in that direction without hesitation.

They went past the sole terminal and three small hangars before Oz found the one he wanted, took a key from his pocket, and opened the side door. The afternoon light cast only a narrow beam into the vast, dark space, but Eric found a light switch, and the lumpy smudge in the middle of the hangar turned into Howell's plane, the Romulus, right where Faith had said it would be.

"Whoa," said Eric, and Oz could see why. The plane had been vandalized with black spray paint, loose spirals decorating its wings and body. At its nose, one on either side, scarlet eyes had been painted with surprising precision. It should have looked ridiculous, but Oz saw the suggestion of a malevolent beast in those eyes, and he felt uneasy.

"Howell," he said. "He's losing it. We're lucky we got here before he tried flying away."

Eric had gone up to the plane and was inspecting it closely. "The engine is dismantled," he said. "Wouldn't be able to take off in this."

Oz nodded, relieved. His plan had been to ground the plane in whatever way they could manage, but it appeared that Howell had taken that precaution himself. The paint job might have come after, as a way to vent his violent compulsions.

"What now?" asked Eric, and Oz led them back to the terminal. The sole attendant on duty barely acknowledged them, and they took seats in the waiting area, both sniffing the air to be sure there was nobody else nearby to overhear.

"You know I can't promise this will work," Oz said flatly.

Eric opened his hands, then folded them again in his lap. "If you're not sure it won't work, I'll take what I can get."

A tone chimed, indicating that a private plane had landed. Eric looked at Oz, who nodded, and they both stood up. "Does she know we're coming to meet her?" asked Eric.

"She knows I'll be there when she needs me."

//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

The first stars had just hit the sky as Faith's Mustang reached the top of the hill. Before parking, she nudged Spike and pointed at Eric and Nina's house: "Look, the light's on. Someone's home."

"I'm coming in with you," he announced, swinging open the car door and planting a boot on the ground.

"Spike!" Faith huffed in exasperation. She hadn't wanted to have this conversation out in the open, but he left her no option but to get out and slam her door shut. "It's gonna be hard enough to get Nina to talk to me if I'm alone. If you're there I don't have a chance."

Spike was flicking his Zippo furiously at a cigarette. Finally he took it away from his lips, unlit, to retort, "And after she opens your ribcage like a stuck cupboard, I'll tell everyone, yes, I was out in the car, Faith didn't want me cramping her style. Is that right?" He replaced the cigarette, lighting it on the first try this time, glaring at her all the while.

"I'm not planning on giving her any reason to hurt me. Anyway, E's probably in there too, and she'll still be keeping up the act for him." She almost added, _If she does decide to attack there's nothing you could do_ , but decided that probably wouldn't much help her case.

He blew out a long column of smoke. "Mr. E's car is gone." He was right, but she didn't have time to come up with a counter-argument before he added in a lower tone, "And that's not how we do things. Not anymore. If I can't face the danger in your place, I'm bloody well facing it at your side."

Lines like that broke down all her defenses, and she didn't have the heart to tell him he wasn't playing fair. "Fine. But no talking. Literally none, you get me? No hello, no goodbye, no anything in between."

Spike gave her a wolfish grin and turned to the house, duster swirling. It was Nina who met them at the door, Nina alone and showing no apparent change since they had last seen her. She made Spike extinguish his cigarette and then invited them both in. Faith greeted and thanked her and Spike was very conspicuously nonverbal.

"Did Angel send you?" Nina inquired, sitting down with them at the small round kitchen table.

"No," said Faith. "He doesn't know we're here. Angel's got this thing where he thinks he can save people's souls, and sometimes he's right, but I don't think he's the man for the job this time."

Nina was smiling with amused detachment. "And you are?"

"All I want is to see you survive this. I mean, I don't want anyone to die, but us I'm not so worried about. We know how to win."

"By killing me, yes." Nina's voice took on a lecturing tone. "You won't do it. None of you will, but especially not you, Faith. Or your vampire dog." She motioned at Spike, who ground his teeth but maintained his vow of silence. "You're both reformed killers. What you've gained, you can't risk losing now. A backslide would destroy you, Faith."

Faith flinched. She had no problem considering the ethics of eliminating a possessed human, from a philosophical perspective, but she couldn't imagine ever recovering if she deliberately killed again. "What is this, the moral high ground? You gotta be shitting me."

"You think it's just about morality?" Nina snapped. "Magic is nothing but opening doors. Vampire drains a human, demon crosses the dimension and takes over the body. Oz's little redhaired girl, she cast a spell and now she's a practitioner forever. If you kill me - me, Nina Ash, innocent woman - evil gets its invitation. And evil is keeping tabs. Evil is dying to know which one of you it gets to claim when you open the door for it."

Faith's heart was pounding so hard that she noticed Spike looking at her with concern. She wanted to leave immediately, but there was one question raised that she needed to have answered. "What door did you open to let the Wolf in?"

A brief flash of interest showed in Nina's eyes, and then her sardonic smile returned. "I transmitted my condition," she said. "I was new to it myself then, but I was a candidate to host as soon as I bit someone and turned him into a werewolf."

"Can't you fight it?"

"I choose not to."

Faith held back tears as she left, Spike attempting to use his small frame to loom protectively over her and scowling at Nina all the while. He hadn't said a single word while he was inside, but Nina could see as she watched them from the window that they were talking as soon as the door closed behind them, and that they met in a tight hug before getting back into the car.

"Cute," she said out loud as they drove away.

A voice answered from the den, clear but uncertain. "Is it true what you said? You've bitten someone before?"

Nina turned to the man as he emerged from the dark room and joined her at the window. She nodded and touched his arm, still bandaged from the fresh bite. "I know how it works. You'll be fine."

"Oh," said Howell. "Thank you."

//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

The anticipated location for the next sacrifice on the spiral was outdoors again, at the nearest intersection to Satellite 3. More importantly, it was deep into the night, so Angel accompanied Buffy to the site, immeasurably relieved that he could be of use for once.

They found Faith and Spike already waiting there, and before long, Oz showed up as well. Angel hadn't seen all of them in one place in days, though they had been sharing news over the phone since the last murder. He was eager to touch base in person, but Faith seemed shaken about something, and Oz had been cagey about what he had learned with Mr. E. He claimed they had worked out a backup plan, but insinuated it was a "werewolf thing", and kept the focus instead on E's role as double agent.

"As long as we're all on board for Tuesday," said Buffy.

Everyone made a sound of agreement, but she said it again when they had spread out to cover the four corners of the intersection, and only Angel was in hearing range. "It's too easy for the Wolf to sabotage us if he takes control of someone who knows about the plan," she continued. "But it's not like we can keep them in the dark, either."

"That's why we're keeping it simple," Angel replied. "Even if the Wolf knows what we're up to, all he can do is try to get warm bodies into the club. And all we can do is make sure he doesn't."

Buffy nodded grimly, and they fell silent, looking for any sign of life closer than the bar. Spike caught their attention from the spot he had staked out across the street, and pointed. Beneath the sign showing the crossing of Main and Rye, a lady was walking a dog, a shaggy grey ghost in the summer night. "The victim," Angel murmured, and showed Buffy his watch: 2:20am.

Faith reached the woman first, moving at a normal pace so as not to alarm her, but the infection kicked in at that point and she was suddenly fumbling in her purse. " _Gun_ ," called Faith, and everyone converged to stop the victim using it on herself.

They succeeded, but not without a fight. The woman was screaming, either in fear or rage, and the dog barked wildly until it found an assailant to bite. It was still hanging onto Spike's leg as an ambulance careened up, sirens blaring.

Angel held the woman from behind, immobilizing her arms and trying to reassure her. Buffy and Faith met the EMTs to explain that they had interfered only to prevent a suicide, and that she still needed to be restrained. Spike detached the dog, and Oz caught it by the leash and made sounds that seemed to calm it down.

"It's 3:07," said Buffy as the ambulance rolled away with the woman in its care. "I think this counts as a success."

She was probably right - with this much time having passed, the Wolf wouldn't be able to manipulate another death into his pattern. Still, Angel had to shake his head. "It won't make a difference to the ritual. Even if we prevent all of them from here on out."

Faith was still staring in the direction that the ambulance had gone. "Yo, how long does the infection take to wear off? That chick was still freaking out when they closed the door."

Angel's thoughts went to Howell, who had shown no improvement and was now at large, but evidence pointed toward that being a more long-term variation on the Wolf's mental influence. "At least she'll have medical care," he said, though he couldn't ignore his own discomfort at the idea. "She'll be supervised as long as she needs it."

There was a silence, broken by the dog whining. Oz looked down at it, then turned to lead it away. "See you guys tomorrow."

The next night's rescue followed a similar sequence. This time it was in the factory next door to Satellite 3, and they cornered a baffled worker in the basement who thought he had come in early to clean up from the night before but instead found himself switching on some potentially fatal equipment when the clock struck 4:58am.

As a group, they overpowered him and called another ambulance to take him away. Angel had to hurry home before the sun came up, but he overheard Faith's discussion with the accompanying police officers as he slipped away, and he wondered if they had saved another person only to leave him indefinitely trapped in a straitjacket.

Oz hadn't been home much, and he had avoided speaking to Angel when he was, but Buffy came over late in the morning and joined Angel in his darkened bedroom. "Tonight's the big night," she said, yawning. "We should get some sleep."

She had brought pajamas with her for that purpose, and she made him lie down with her on the twin bed, pressing her back against his chest and arranging his arm around her. He kept still and listened to her breathing, thinking he wouldn't be able to sleep, but the trust radiating from her small body cast a spell of contentment over him. They had more than one big night ahead, and they would both need to be at peak performance. He slept.


	3. Chapter 3

Monday nights were as slow at Satellite 3 as they were at any other bar, but the main door still had enough people going in and out that Buffy couldn’t say with any certainty who would be the unlucky one to step into place on the spiral’s path at the determined time of 9:25pm. She was the only one who was waiting and watching there, this time, since everyone who had a role to play needed to keep a low profile. Buffy didn’t think she would have any trouble restraining the victim, but the trick was to do it without drawing enough attention that she would be asked about it once she went into the bar.

At 9:20, she called 911, claiming an altercation with a mentally distressed individual. It was suspicious to describe the incident before it happened, but that calculated risk was better than wasting time in a struggle while waiting for the paramedics to take over. Anyway, at this point most of Cleveland’s first responders understood that their recent troubles were supernatural, and that Buffy was among those who were here to help.

Sure enough, the ambulance pulled up as she was wrenching a wad of fliers from a young man who was trying to use them to choke himself, and after he had been secured, Buffy was hailed by an officer who recognized her from the factory. “Are you okay, miss?”

“Fine,” said Buffy, feeling oddly touched. He truly sounded concerned about her.

“Then do you mind telling me what the hell is going on here?”

She dropped her face into her hand for a moment before answering. “My hometown used to just say ‘gangs on PCP’ and expect people to believe it. Cleveland doesn’t go in for that, huh?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, keeping his tone low although they were the only ones left on the sidewalk. “If you’re the reason the killings have tapered off, we’re grateful. But nobody’s going to feel all that reassured when they hear we’re getting hit with random cases of insanity instead.”

Buffy took a deep breath. “One more day. I can promise you, that’s all we need.”

He paused, then nodded and reached into his pocket to hand her his card. “After tomorrow night, I’m going to need a full report.”

She agreed reluctantly, shook his hand, then opened the door beneath the neon sign and entered Satellite 3.

It was a neat place, she thought, feeling a little sad about it. She wished that she and Angel could have come here just for fun, like Spike and Faith did, and all the werewolves. The bartender, a heavily pierced woman she didn’t recognize, smiled at her as she took a seat at the bar. _What the hell,_ Buffy thought, and ordered a strawberry daiquiri. “Does it come with a little umbrella?”

“And a skewer of fruit. You’re gonna love it.” They both chuckled, and Buffy made sure to put down her payment right away, so that the girl wouldn’t miss out on a good tip.

She was halfway through the drink when the vampires busted in.

The first scream rang out and Buffy had to resist every instinct in her body, even though she knew exactly what was going on and that nobody was in danger. She had no weapons on her, even a stake, but she had scoped out the room and formed a plan to break a chair before her mind caught up and reminded her that she was supposed to be as helpless as everyone else in the bar.

She got down from her stool and slid down the wall of the bar as if hiding, trying to see what was going on without leaving her cover. There was a stampede of patrons and staff heading for the exit, and then a large pair of hands reached down to her level and hoisted her to her feet.

It was embarrassingly easy to fake a startled shriek. Angel put a forearm behind her back, cradled her head in his other hand, and leaned her back against the bar, burying his face in the crook of her neck. His lips only touched her for a second, but he kept his head down, making growling noises that seemed a little overdone. She made a mental note to tease him about it later.

“All clear!” shouted Spike from across the bar.

Angel straightened up, tucking a few stray strands of Buffy’s hair back in place. She frowned. “I was just getting into it!”

He smiled, his face still close to hers. “If we kept going much longer I might have lost myself in the part.”

“Well, we did want to make it convincing.” She batted her lashes innocently.

“How about a second take?”

“One slight variation.” 

They kissed hard, arms wrapped around each other, until Spike found them there after completing a final check around the premises by himself. “Do I have to separate the two of you?” he bellowed, then stomped away muttering, “May as well be a bloody high school counselor.”

Buffy cast a mischievous smirk at Angel, just to show him that she wasn’t feeling sheepish at all, and he returned it and planted a kiss on her head before they both left the bar to join Spike. “What next?” asked Angel.

“Barricade,” said Buffy. “We need to make sure nobody can get in any way but the front door.” They weren’t sure when Faith would show up -- to make it look natural, she would have to wait for the news to reach her on its own, or better yet, for someone to ask for her help. They would be ready to allow her inside, but it was likely to take a few hours at least. 

Spike nodded curtly. “Let’s split up, but you stay together, since you’ll find an excuse for it anyway and mostly I just don’t want you tagging along behind me.”

Buffy and Angel looked at each other, then at Spike, and agreed in unison. They started at the back of the club, where there was a narrow delivery door, easily blocked by wedging a table in front of it. The stage was next: access for performers came from a small backstage area with a door of its own. Angel had to deal with that one on his own, as the lights were off there and they had agreed to not turn any on, for fear that they would be seen from outside and noted as an odd thing for a vampire to need. “This is so Scooby-Doo,” Buffy observed as she peeked around the darkened corner where he had just emerged.

“Like the Scooby Gang?” he frowned, dusting his hands together.

“We got that name from an old cartoon about pulling sheets off of fake ghosts. The characters were always bumbling around haunted houses waiting for something to jump out of the shadows.”

He considered that. “I already jumped out of the shadows.”

She slipped her hand into his and they stepped down from the stage. “Yup. This time we’re the fake ghosts.” Her lip quirked. “And I fully intend to get away with it, too.”

Spike had assigned himself the basement, so the next stop for Buffy and Angel was upstairs. She approached the stairwell with some trepidation, remembering the first time she had seen Satellite 2 and how Nina’s blind faith in the Wolf had chilled her. There was also a possibility, if remote, that a patron or two had decided to hide up there instead of evacuating with everyone else, and Buffy didn’t particularly want to explain the situation to them.

But the room was quiet as the grave -- the kind of grave where the dead stayed dead -- and searching it thoroughly turned up nothing out of the ordinary. Angel finished tapping at walls and came up behind Buffy where she was standing, arms crossed, in front of the black door that Oz had told her was the entrance to the mysterious Satellite 1. She said as much to Angel, then squared her shoulders and tried the knob.

It was locked, of course. Buffy wished that she felt disappointed about that rather than relieved, but all she said to Angel was, “If we want to be ready we may need to break this down.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “Let’s wait for the others, though.”

If all went well, the spiral wouldn’t even get this far, and Buffy’s thoughts were still circling around that hope. They would do everything they could to keep the Wolf’s avatar away from the heart of the building at the crucial moment, and then there wouldn’t be any integral components left and the subsequent Apocalypse could be averted. After that, they could figure out how to deal with Nina’s possession.

Buffy turned back into the room and took a folded sheet from her pocket, laying it down on the bar to smooth it out. “We should get to work on this,” she said. It showed the spiral drawn through Satellite 3’s floor plan, each sacrifice’s location marked on it with the time from Willow’s calculations. 

Angel agreed, and they made their way back downstairs to where Spike was studying his own copy of the plan by the main door. He gave them a look that suggested he had been waiting too long, and then a gesture that suggested he didn’t want to hear about what they had been up to. Buffy rolled her eyes up to meet Angel’s, and he half-smiled and squeezed her shoulder. 

Spike cleared his throat loudly. “Seven thirty-five,” he said, then dropped to a crouch and snapped the paper at them. “Right here.” He took a large piece of white chalk from his duster pocket and drew a large X on the floor corresponding to the one on the page, along with the time.

“One thing to remember,” said Buffy. “This is how we know where not to stand, but if we’re the only suckers in here and the Wolf is getting desperate, it’s a pretty sure bet he’ll try to use us. We have to look out for each other. If anyone starts coming up with excuses to go chill over by the X, skip the argument and go straight to tying them down.”

Both vampires nodded grimly, and they all moved along to the next location, near the coat check. Spike scrawled out another X, then the time “1:52” beside it. Buffy looked around the room, estimating the places where they would put the next few marks. “It’s funny,” she mused. “You would think that the spiral would end up going back outside, or in a spot we couldn’t reach, or something. But it looks like it’s going to curl right around the room and then go up the stairs. Like the whole building was designed for this.”

“It probably was,” said Angel just as she was coming to the same conclusion. She shivered. Facing the Wolf was one thing, knowing that his plan had been in the works since before she was born was another.

Spike went on to pinpoint the patch of floor where he would write “5:45”, and Angel pitched his voice lower to keep the conversation between himself and Buffy. “What I’m wondering is, where did the golden spiral begin? Maybe nobody noticed it until it reached Cleveland, but with the times and locations stretched out, why would they?”

Buffy blinked, considering that. “Geez. It could have been the entire planet. Hemisphere, anyway, or the loops would have to get smaller again.” She shook her head. “One more reminder that we can’t ever save everyone, huh?”

He put his arms around her, and they stood together for a moment, forehead to forehead. Buffy felt her phone vibrate, and broke off the embrace to open a message from Faith: _On my way._

“Little early,” Buffy observed. “Seems like, just tactically, they would want to send her in when there’s some daylight to be had. It’s not like a bar needs to be ready to open first thing in the morning.”

“Don’t forget,” said Angel, “Satellite 3’s owner is Wolf-infected. He’ll be desperate to open the doors as soon as possible.”

The thought of Dameon Wolfe made Buffy twitch. “Meddling kids,” she muttered. 

“Huh?”

Buffy sighed. “Look, when we have the traditional victory slack after this, it’s going to include a cartoon marathon. Don’t fight me on this. Honestly I thought you’d have beefed up more on your pop culture by now.”

Faith soon arrived, announcing her presence by banging at the door and loudly telling someone outside that she could easily kick it in if she had to. Spike rushed over and unlocked it, then stood back to stay out of view for anyone who might be gawking from outside. There was an impressive bang, then Faith appeared framed in the doorway, armed to the teeth. From her vantage point far to the side, Buffy was impressed to see Faith’s eyes sweep across the entire room without giving any sign that she had seen the Slayer and two vampires already in there.

Faith looked back over her shoulder. “If you absolutely have to send someone in after me, make sure it’s a Slayer. And don’t expect me to get this done fast. I’ll text you to update.”

There was a response from the other side which Buffy couldn’t hear, and then Faith took a step forward and the heavy door closed behind her, leaving her face to face with Spike. She held out a sword hilt-first for him, then used it to draw him in closer for a kiss as Buffy and Angel ambled over. Buffy gave them what she thought was a reasonable length of time, then coughed politely.

“Yo,” said Faith, unstrapping a few more weapons from herself. 

Buffy noticed for the first time that she had the Slayer Scythe across her back, which was an unexpected but welcome sight. “That’s some artillery,” she remarked as Faith released a buckle and handed her the Scythe. 

“Yeah, well, had to make it look like I meant business about clearing out the vamps. Anyway, you never know when you’re gonna get in a fight so I figured none of us should be empty-handed.” She gave a battleaxe to Angel, who frowned at it and then shrugged and accepted it.

“How is it out there?” he asked.

Faith made a balancing hand gesture. “Paranoid but not panicky. Wolfe suspected you guys, y’know. People came out of here with lousy vague descriptions of you, and he still asked me straight off if it was that big guy and blond chick who made a disturbance the other night.”

That was alarming. Buffy had assumed that Angel and Spike would have enough of a disguise in their game faces, but now she realized how distinctive all three of them really were.

Before she could say anything, though, Faith continued, “He knows I come here with my boyfriend, too.” She glanced at Spike. “Good thing you had that wig.”

“Wait, Spike was in a _wig?_ ” Buffy practically screeched. “And I _missed_ it?!”

He mumbled something in response, and Angel deadpanned, “It was glorious.”

“To business, people,” Spike growled.

Faith smothered a giggle. “Let’s go sit down. I’ll fill you in on everything.”

They locked the door securely and disabled the alarm with a well-placed sword thrust, and Buffy suggested that they make use of the more comfortable space in Satellite 2. She led the way up the stairs, where Faith halted in surprise. “There’s a whole ‘nother club in here? I thought Satellite 2 was gonna be, like, a little office or something.”

Spike had been lagging behind, busy with something at the main bar; now he entered and nearly dropped the bottles he was holding two to a hand. “Bloody hell! Why didn’t we ever know about this?”

Buffy thought it best to avoid speculating out loud on that point, but she had been wondering about it herself. Would Oz and his other friends keep this secret from Spike and Faith simply because they weren’t werewolves? 

Faith seemed ready to shrug it off immediately, although Spike kept grumbling for a while about nobody telling him that there even _was_ a Satellite 2. The four of them settled down in a comfortable corner with a couch facing a pair of armchairs over a low table, and Buffy felt a pang of nostalgia which Angel voiced for her just a moment later: “This place reminds me of the Bronze.”

“Because all hell is about to break loose?” Faith inquired. “Yeah, me too.”

Spike set down his four bottles on the table, now recognizable as four different kinds of hard alcohol, full to varied levels. “They were all open when I found them,” he informed everyone, “so spare me any lectures about stealing.”

They found glasses behind Satellite 2’s bar, and Buffy allowed a splash of rum to go into hers just because it was easier than arguing about it. Faith didn’t sit back down immediately after they had all been served. “Is this the place where the sidewalk ends?” she asked, following the spiral’s path across the floor with her eyes. The line of chalk clearly stopped at the locked door to the next room.

Angel shook his head. “That’s where the axe is going to come in handy.”

“Sure about that?” Spike swiveled with an arm draped over the back of his chair to examine the door. “If Nina goes in there, she’ll leave it open for the victims to follow. If she doesn’t get that far, we won’t need to either.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know she’ll come in the way we did,” said Buffy. “We can’t just guard this one entrance.”

Faith disagreed, saying that walls were the best thing that the building had going for it, and that they shouldn’t waste any. Spike took her side. Buffy noticed vehemence in her own voice before she realized that she was getting wound up. Angel didn’t contribute as much to their side as she wanted him to. 

They all had too much history with each other, she thought. Angel and Spike, Faith and Angel, herself and Faith...with the four of them in a room together, it was a wonder they had lasted this long without tempers flaring. “Let’s go find the secret entrance to Satellite 1,” she said, loudly enough to interrupt everyone else. “Then we can at least put that to bed.”

“Don’t see how that’ll do much good,” Spike countered, “seeing as I’ve just been through the entire basement and--”

Buffy was already out the door and stomping down the stairs, Angel close at her heels. After a short pause, she heard two more sets of footsteps following. She turned to face them in the middle of the main seating area and spoke on impulse: “Let’s split up. Faith, can you come with me?”

As a path to reconciliation, it worked well. Angel and Spike took the ground floor, and Faith and Buffy wandered through the basement with flashlights, saying little to each other until Faith, unprompted, began to relate a story. Apparently she and Spike had gone to visit Nina without informing anyone else of their plans. Buffy held her tongue. They had both survived it, and she didn’t want to be scolding right now.

What scared her about the incident was the same thing that scared Faith: Nina knew that she was hosting the Wolf, and she seemed to be threatening terrible consequences to anyone who vanquished it by killing her. “We have to stay away from her,” Faith concluded. “If you try to fight her directly she’ll either kill you or use you for something worse.”

Buffy sneezed; the dust in the basement’s air was pervasive. “That’s why you don’t want to break the wall down upstairs?” 

Faith’s flashlight beam bobbed as she shrugged. “I know it probably can’t make much of a difference, but I feel like if we’re keeping her away from the center, she could end up chasing us into it. So, y’know...wall.”

“Speaking of walls,” Buffy sighed. “There’s no way we’re going to find the secret entrance down here, is there?”

They regrouped in Satellite 2 to find that the vampires had had no more luck. They weren’t snapping at each other, though, so Buffy gathered that Spike had been giving Angel the same information that Faith had just given her. She flopped back onto the same seat she had claimed on the couch earlier, feeling frustrated and weary, and leaned on Angel as soon as he joined her. “The secret door is probably in that adjoining factory,” he said, gliding his fingers through her hair. “But we can’t leave now.”

Buffy let herself doze, knowing it was a safe time for it and feeling the refreshment could do her good. She awoke quite suddenly but without any sense of being shaken out of sleep, and she looked around for clues on what had disturbed her. Angel was still at her side, frowning at her with concern in his dark eyes.

“What time is it?” she asked, blinking rapidly. 

Faith and Spike were standing by the closed door to the stairwell, both with their arms crossed tightly. “Seven thirty,” said Faith. “Five minutes to go.”

Buffy’s heart rate quadrupled. “Does anyone feel any weird urges?”

“Not so far,” said Angel. “We thought about waking you up, but if you had stayed asleep it would just mean one less potential--”

He was cut off by a quick tussle at the door. Faith had lunged for the knob, and Spike was holding her back, but evidently using every bit of his strength to do it. Buffy and Angel leaped up from the couch. Angel blocked the door while Buffy helped Spike with Faith, who had started a kind of babbling that was mutating into screams. “Let me go downstairs I _have to go downstairs_ let me go _let me go LET ME GO!”_

The next time Buffy had a chance to look at a clock, it was after eight. Faith was just barely beginning to calm down, and Buffy had tears in her own eyes from seeing her friend in such a state. Angel looked as nerve wracked as she had ever seen him, but Spike had shown his best side, clinging tightly to his girl throughout her ordeal without giving way for a second. He was still holding her now, but with utmost tenderness, whispering to her as her heaving breath gradually slowed to a normal rhythm.

It finally seemed safe to give them some space, so Buffy stood back with Angel and pitched her voice so that only he could hear her. “I was afraid that…” She swallowed. “The last one took longer to get over it. He only stopped struggling right before he went into the ambulance.”

“Inner coil,” he replied at the same volume. “Everything is happening in a tighter pattern.”

“Then it should be okay by now to go downstairs. I need to make sure we’re still secure.”

She was half worried that she would find the body of some stranger who had forced his way inside while they were dealing with Faith, but the chalk marks by the front door were unmarred and the bar was as quiet as ever. She and Angel did another walk through the building, testing their barricades, and Angel informed her that while she was asleep, Faith had been texting her contacts outside and making up reasons for them to stay outside. 

From there, it was a long six hours to wait for the next scheduled suicide. Buffy found some food in the kitchen that passed for breakfast. Angel went backstage and cleared his mind with some tai chi. Faith rested. For a while they all played cards and talked about whatever helped distract them from the real reason they were there.

Spike was next. He was even harder to restrain, but Angel made up for that by having no compunctions about hitting him to keep him down. His recovery time was faster than Faith’s, too, which was the only upside that anyone could find at this point.

“Do you think the next one will be me or you?” Buffy asked Angel quietly as they sat on the stage waiting for Spike to recuperate.

He shook his head. “Maybe Nina will show up first, and then we can all get out of here. As long as we can keep her out of the building, we’ll be safe.”

“There’s one more victim before the sun goes down.” Her eyes followed the chalk line. “Right about here, actually.”

Angel immediately slid down from the stage. “Let’s sit somewhere else.”

Another voice answered him. “Yeah, it’s not like there’s a shortage of empty tables.”

Buffy jumped -- the voice had come from behind her -- but its familiarity kept her from feeling afraid. “Willow?!” 

She slid down beside Angel, and they both turned around. It was Willow’s astral projection, which explained how she had gotten behind them silently. Buffy pouted in disapproval. “I thought you were putting the brakes on the magic pop-upping.”

“I am,” Willow replied. “This is just to tell you to open the door.” She pointed to the main entrance.

“Who for?” Angel asked.

“Me.” The projection vanished, and Buffy and Angel looked at each other and then rushed to follow the instructions.

Soon, Buffy had her arms around Willow, the real Willow, the three-dimensional flesh and blood Willow, and Angel was securing the door with locks and furniture once again. “Gimme an infodump,” Buffy demanded, releasing the witch with a final firm hug. “You didn’t even tell me you were on your way!”

Willow shrugged, a half-heartedly apologetic gesture. “Couldn’t risk the Wolf finding out. I’m going to try something, but you infodump first. Where are Spike and Faith?”

They brought her upstairs, where Spike was indulging himself at the bar and Faith was keeping a close eye on him. Both seemed to have mostly recovered, although Spike was still sporting a few bruises from Angel’s efforts to keep him away from the spiral, and both were just as surprised by Willow’s arrival as Buffy had been.

“So only one at a time of you was affected by the mind control?” Willow asked once they had brought her up to speed. Her relief was evident when they all nodded. “Good. That was the main thing I was worried about. Okay, so I don’t have time to explain this all in detail, but…” She reached into the floppy satchel she was carrying on her shoulder and pulled out a clear glass ball. “Look familiar?”

Angel took a quick step back. “Is that an Orb of Thesulah?”

“Not exactly,” she replied, and slipped it back into the bag. “It’s related, though. The Wolf isn’t a soul, so I had to make a few modifications and it’s still a shot in the dark but honestly why would I _not_ try it if there’s any chance at all?”

“So that’s why you’re here?” Faith asked. “To shoot in the dark?”

Willow’s posture seemed to sag a little. “I felt bad leaving you all to it. I’m part of this one. And I...I kind of made a promise.”

Somehow, all four of them had the sense to not ask her who the promise had been made to, but Buffy could narrow down the possibilities with ease. Maybe this was what Oz had been so secretive about lately.

Her remorseful attitude already dissipating, Willow was back to business. “I can’t cast it until Nina is inside the building. And then she’ll probably try to attack me, or she’ll bring along someone to sic on me, so I need you brawny types to watch my back.”

“On it!” said Buffy cheerfully. “And if the spell doesn’t work, we’ll nominate someone to be your bodyguard until this is over.”

“No,” Willow responded, suddenly sounding suspicious and looking at her like a complete stranger. “If it doesn’t work, you nominate someone to kill Nina so this ends immediately.”

Angel turned away as if overwhelmed. Spike was the first to answer, his voice rough: “We’d better explain you the plan, Red.”

Willow’s posture and tone showed clearly that she didn’t recognize any room for compromise. “There is no other plan. Once she gets this close to the center, there won’t be time for anything except my spell. You won’t have a snowball’s chance in a Hellmouth of dragging her away afterward.”

“So don’t cast the spell.” Buffy had spoken before thinking, and it came as a surprise even to herself, but she didn’t second guess it. “Just help us prevent her from reaching home base by the end of the countdown, and we can try to restore her soul once the commotion dies down.”

“That’s not how it works!” Willow snapped.

Spike’s retort was right over her words. “Who died and left you their Senior Partner possession manual?”

Faith’s phone rang loudly, and she muttered, “Ah, shit,” before answering it and demanding more time. “Yeah it’s fine, I’m gonna get the vamps real soon, just don’t let anyone -- what? No! No don’t come in!” The front door and the wall around it reverberated, and Faith ran toward it, still arguing into the phone.

Her voice, the banging at the door, and the ongoing insults that Willow and Spike were hurling at each other were all devoid of interest, Buffy realized. The one thing that she really cared about was going back to the stage, just to sit down there. At the moment she was unarmed, but, confident that she would know what to do when the moment came, she turned to drift in that direction without saying anything.

In the next breath, Angel had caught up to her and was trying to pull her back away. She was too strong for him, but he gasped out, “Help!” and Buffy’s feet began to drag, as if through thick mud.

She looked down to see that an unnatural blue mist was swirling around her ankles. “Willow!” she grunted. “Cut it out!” But her friends were yelling back and forth at each other and not speaking to her at all, just ganging up to keep her away from the stage. Buffy screamed in frustration. She was so close, but she knew that close wouldn’t cut it this time.

The front door to the club burst open. Buffy looked up in sudden hope; maybe this would be enough of a distraction for Angel and the others to loosen their grip on her. People were coming in, lots of people, and she thought she knew some of them, but didn’t care enough to look closer and think any more about it. She still couldn’t struggle free of the binding mist, or the arms holding her. “Angel,” she sobbed. “If you love me how can you do this to me?”

His body tensed, so she knew he was affected by the accusation, but it only served him right if he was hurt. All of them were keep her her from the only thing she had ever cared about. The crucial moment was slipping away from her with a sense of impending doom followed closely by infinite loss. She knew then that she had failed, and failed forever. Her knees buckled. Angel’s hand settled on her back as she covered her face and cried.

Dimly she was aware of many voices clashing in argument above her. Some of them came closer, asking if she was okay, but Angel snarled at them to back off, and they did. Then he was cradling her and lifting her, and she rode up the stairwell in his arms, too defeated to protest.

When her mind began to clear, she was on the couch in Satellite 2 again, and unsure of how much time had passed. Angel was beside her, but Willow was in the room too, standing beside a dark-haired man covered in tattoos. Buffy blinked. “Mr....Eric?”

His voice was curt, matching his scowl and stiff posture. “Sorry for busting in like that. We closed up the doors again, but we’re not leaving until this is over.”

Buffy sat up, raking her fingers through her hair. “‘We’?” She tried to gather up her disconnected memories and sync them with the sounds she could hear coming from the main floor. “Eric, did you bring your whole pack inside here? Don’t you understand what’s going on?”

“Perfectly,” he snapped.

Angel raised his hand in a suppliant gesture and spoke to Buffy. “They understand. We’ve been working out a compromise.”

“Oz was supposed to be guarding the entrance,” she muttered in response. 

“He is,” said Eric.

 _So Oz let the pack in,_ thought Buffy. _We probably should have seen that coming._ Still, she had to wonder how Oz had known enough to anticipate this situation, before her own team had even known that Willow would be here. 

She caught Willow’s eye for long enough to see her look away and blush, as if shamed. As far as Buffy was concerned, that left nothing else to discuss about Oz, but she raised her voice and asked, “I guess this means we’re going with your plan?”

Willow sighed. “I’m just trying to adapt to what we have to--”

“Willow.” Buffy wasn’t angry, exactly, but she was fed up and low on concern over who knew it. “Which plan?”

“Mine. Yes.” The witch turned away from her, skirt rustling. “I’m going to cast the spell as soon as Nina comes close.”

 

Buffy was tempted to remind her that she had been the one to propose killing Nina in the event that the spell failed, but it would be insane to mention that in Eric’s presence. She kept her question as vague as possible: “Then what?”

There was a long enough silence to prove that Willow didn’t have a good answer ready, and then Angel cleared his throat. “We have a more immediate problem on our hands. For the past three spiral points it’s taken everything we have to make sure nobody commits suicide. When we get to 8:09 I don’t know how we’re going to manage it with a crowd.”

“We’ll handle that,” said Eric confidently. 

Buffy pushed herself off the couch and to her feet. “This is ridiculous.” She stalked across the room and unlocked the bolts on the door to the stairs, but when she grabbed the knob it still wouldn’t budge despite the considerable strength she was putting into it. She looked at Willow, whose expression remained blank for a moment before she apologized and made a gesture at the door, which opened immediately. Angel followed Buffy out.

Faith and Spike were waiting at the bottom of the stairwell, just like the bouncers presumably would have on an ordinary night. “You alright?” asked Faith.

“Fine. I need to...” She looked around at all of the werewolves lounging around the club, then up at Angel. “Come with me.”

Together they squeezed through the crowd and returned to the stage, mounting the steps and standing at the center of it this time. Buffy did a rough count of the people she was looking down on and came to a couple dozen, most of them faces that she recognized from the Independence Day barbecue. They were quieting down, facing her and Angel in curiosity over what she was going to say. 

She took a deep breath. “Can someone...anyone....tell me why you’re here.”

“To protect our alpha!” rang out one solitary youthful voice. Buffy’s eyes found the source and confirmed what her ears had already told her: it was Jordan. Both of his parents were there, too. She just hoped they’d had enough sense to leave their little girl behind.

A buzz of agreement passed through the crowd. Angel spoke next: “If that’s really what you want, you’ll listen to her.” He pointed at Buffy. “This is more dangerous than any of you comprehend, but if you do exactly as Buffy tells you, all of us might just survive the night. If you’ve got any other kind of intention, or if you have enough common sense to look out for your own safety, leave, and do it now.”

It was satisfying to see the way they all began shifting uncomfortably at Angel’s dire words and fierce glower, but none of them moved for the door. Buffy did the rest of the talking, explaining about the chalk line on the floor and the countdown to the center. She even described how she had felt as the last victim on the spiral’s path, and her certainty that she would have died even without any means to kill herself. 

Angel looked startled; she hadn’t told this part to anyone before revealing it to the entire room. Willow was standing near the back, nodding, and Buffy recalled that this had been part of her initial description of the ritual: eventually the deaths would become automatic if the sacrifice was standing at the right spot. “The best thing to do is not be in here,” Buffy finished, “but since you are, just do whatever you can to keep each other away from the chalk of death. Eric, anything you want to add?”

Eric had been watching silently as part of the audience, and looked a little surprised to be called upon. Nevertheless, he climbed onto the nearest chair and announced, “I can’t begin to say how grateful I am that all of you--”

“That’s enough,” Buffy cut in loudly. “I meant anything useful to add, not some Academy Awards crap. Willow, how about you?”

Willow had no need to stand on a chair; she created a pillar of light with herself in the middle, easily drawing the attention of everyone there. “Just this. I’m going to be working with some fairly master-class magic and no, you can’t help, so once I’m on it, get the _hell out of my kitchen._ When you see your alpha-lady, make sure--”

The front door was flung wide open. Willow’s magic spotlight vanished, as if of its own accord, and reappeared over Nina, who was striding nonchalantly into Satellite 3. Angel grabbed Buffy’s hand and gave it a quick press, then released it. Neither he, nor she, nor Willow, Faith, Spike, or any of the werewolves said a word or moved a muscle as Nina paused under the light and surveyed the room. 

Then came the soft words of a chant from Willow, who was otherwise blending into the dark with the rest of the crowd. Without acknowledging her, or anyone else, Nina raised her arms over her head and snapped the fingers of both hands, and two men came in and stood slightly behind her, one to each side. One was wearing a black suit and an expression of intense hatred: the club’s owner, Damien Wolfe. The other was John Howell.

In a surge of fear, Buffy realized that nobody was upstairs to block Nina from getting any deeper into the spiral, but in the same moment, she saw Faith and Spike stealthily moving that way. Given their placement on the stage, she thought it was up to her and Angel to provide a distraction, but Eric was back up on his chair and he spoke first. “Nina. We’re here, see, we’re all here to help you. My God, I love you so much, please let me help you.”

Nina giggled, a totally natural sound that chilled Buffy to the bone. She snapped her fingers again, and Wolfe and Howell reacted to it as a cue and shifted out of humanity.

They had the same stance and shape as Nina’s own wolf form, but bigger than any Buffy had ever seen, and that was to say nothing of how they could be doing this without a full moon. Howell was a ruddy brown beast who snapped nervously at the remains of his clothes as they ripped off of him. Wolfe was dark-furred and poised like a coiled spring. Nina barely glanced at either of them, just turned and sauntered toward the stairs.

“STOP HER!” Angel shouted, and every werewolf in the room sprang into action as if waking from hypnosis. Several of them began their own transformations, serving as a reminder for Buffy that some pack members were capable of inducing it at will. Oz could -- where was Oz? But there was no time to think about that. She and Angel jumped down from the stage, taking up the nearest weapons they could find, a sword for her and an axe for him. 

By the time they reached the fray, Howell was fighting with one wolf and several brave humans, and Wolfe was holding off no fewer than three fully transformed werewolves. Buffy and Angel managed to slip past them all, though Buffy hated to dodge a battle, especially with Willow nowhere in sight. The stairwell was dark -- the spotlight had apparently gone out -- but Nina was at the top and the door was closed in front of her, so Faith and Spike must have gotten through.

Nina didn’t seem to be banging on the door, just tapping it gently, but her fingertips resounded like a gong, and the foundation shook each time. At her third tap, the door was blown off of its hinges and torn to splinters, and she stepped through the opening without a backwards glance while Buffy wasn’t yet halfway up the stairs.

By the time that she and Angel made it into Satellite 2, Nina had passed through. The door to Satellite 1 was intact, but left carelessly open. Spike was in a crumpled heap on one side of the room, and Faith’s long brown hair showed from behind the bar.

Angel rushed over to Faith, and Buffy knelt at Spike’s side, moving his arm away from his face and checking for signs of unlife. She let out the breath she had been holding when he groaned and fluttered his eyes open. “Think I broke a few...” he began, then jerked his head up. “Faith!”

“She’s alive,” Angel called from the bar. “I think she’ll be okay, she just needs--”

There was the sound of feet pounding up the stairs, then Willow appeared in the doorway. She spent about a second sizing up the situation, then dashed over to Faith and set to work on a healing spell as Spike made his way over with Buffy’s support. 

Faith was still unconscious when Willow finished, but she informed them curtly that this was for the best, and turned to Spike, whose arm did appear to be broken. He swatted her away with the other one. “Forget that, Red, we don’t have time.”

“He’s right,” said Buffy. “Where are Wolfe and--?”

The answer came bounding up the stairs before she had time to complete the question. Wolfe was first, and Buffy got her sword back into her hand only for him to ignore her and everyone else completely. He crossed the room in a few leaps and shoved his bulk through the narrow open door, and then Howell was there, following the same path and hesitating only for a second when he saw the defense team huddled together by the bar.

Buffy dropped her sword and touched Willow’s shoulder. “Cast the spell.”

“What?” Willow was panting, making repeated attempts to brush her red hair from her eyes.

“Nina is close enough, isn’t she? Do it now while we’re not under attack. We’ll guard the room for you so nobody can interrupt. This might be our last chance.”

The witch’s eyes were wide with incomprehension. “Buffy,” she said slowly. “I already cast the spell. It failed.”

Angel and Spike both looked up from Faith’s prone form. Their faces showed the same shock that Buffy felt: their best hope was gone. Nina and her bodyguards had already accessed the home base, and now there was nothing between the Wolf and the ritual that would secure him to the material world forever.

Another wolf appeared at the top of the stairs, and everyone flinched until remembering that the only ones left on that side of Satellite 2 were on their own side. The creature stared in their direction, slavering, and then shuddered with visible effort and shrank into a naked man crouching on the floor. Eric lifted his head and spoke in a cracked voice. “Where is she?”

“Satellite Bloody One,” said Spike. “But it’s a bit late to be making nice with the lady.”

“Have there been any casualties downstairs?” Angel asked.

Eric closed his eyes before admitting, “Two. A few more were bitten, but...we already have lycanthropy anyway.” He spat on the floor, and Buffy noticed a red tinge to his teeth. “If her guards are in there with her you should let us handle them.”

Buffy grabbed the countertop to pull herself up, intending to inform Eric that he and his people weren’t going to do anything of the sort, but Angel put a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “He’s right. You and Willow and Faith are the only ones here who are vulnerable to werewolf bites.”

“Ken, Maureen!” Eric called over his shoulder. As soon as he heard an answering bark, he seemed to relax his control over his body, for the fur was growing back and his face no longer looked like it would be capable of human speech.

There was a stampede of paws on the stairs, but before anything came through the door, the sounds abruptly turned into a brief whine and a heavy thump, then silence. Buffy felt the blood drain from her face. She shared a look with Angel and knew that the same realization had reached him at the same time: the next stop on the spiral was on those stairs. The time, which nobody had been watching, was 8:09.

Even the wolf which had been Eric a moment ago seemed frozen in place. The only sound was Jordan Godfrey’s voice on the stairwell: “...Dad?”

Buffy clapped both hands over her mouth to stifle a choking gasp, but she couldn’t look away from the chalk line curving across the floor. The next death would be in here, in less than an hour, and with the door blown away, there was no way to close it off to the next victim.

Angel and Spike stood up at the same time, both taking hold of their weapons. “Well come on then!” Spike shouted as he limped across the room to the door to Satellite 1. Angel said nothing, but he strode with grim determination and no injuries, and got there first, kicking the door from ajar to wide open.

“Can you do anything?” Buffy hissed at Willow, but Willow was no longer at her side. No doubt she had gone to try to save Ken while Buffy was distracted. Buffy cursed. The only person left behind the bar with her was Faith, who was still unconscious. “Someone’s got to look after you,” she murmured, but Angel and Spike were walking headlong into a deathtrap, and she cried out in frustration and left Faith behind. 

The Scythe was lying across the bar, and she snatched it up as she vaulted over. Spike was already engaging Wolfe, while Angel dealt with Howell. The wolves had come out to meet them, though, so the door was still open and nobody was inside Satellite 1 -- except, presumably, Nina. As Buffy was deciding on which ally to assist, a trio of howls started up behind her, and then Eric and two other pack werewolves were throwing themselves at Wolfe and Howell. Buffy couldn’t agonize over these decisions any longer. She took the opening and stepped into the room.

Although she didn’t close the door behind her, the first thing that struck her about Satellite 1 was that it seemed much quieter: the snarls and thuds of the battle behind her were muted and easy to ignore. The second thing she noticed was the tiny size and emptiness of the room. There was no furniture or decoration whatsoever, and it wouldn’t have fit much anyway. The white walls were only broken up by the door behind her, one on the opposite wall, and a trapdoor on the ceiling.

The third thing she noticed was that Nina wasn’t there. Buffy tried the door and found it locked, leaving her to wonder whether the Wolf was using it to buy some time, or if this was all part of the plan. They had all assumed that Satellite 1 would be the final destination, but the dimensions in here didn’t match up to any of their maps and floor plans, and she could see that if their chalk line were drawn in here, it would lead to the door she was facing.

Someone stepped up behind her, and she turned with a jerk to see Faith, leaning on the wall and looking like a truck had run her over a few times, but fully conscious. “So this is Satellite 1.” She shook her head ruefully. “You know, this place was swarming with conspiracy theorists. Always wondering if there was a door behind the door behind the door. I only ever wondered why anyone gave a shit.” She gestured at the locked door. “But I’m gonna guess that’s not a mop closet.”

Buffy ushered her deeper into the room and shut the outer door behind them. “Faith, you shouldn’t be on your feet.” 

“Don’t think I’m playing cavalry. I can’t fight. But if you go in there alone, the Wolf’s gonna have her way with you and you’re not even gonna know it.”

“If we both go in she’ll--”

Faith raised her voice to a near shout. “Yeah, she’s holding all the cards! We’re screwed, I know! What do you want, to sit on our hands until she comes out again all omnipotent?”

The outburst had cost her; she ended it with her head against the wall, breathing heavily. Buffy thought about Angel, who as far as she knew was still fighting Nina’s henchmen in the next room. If she and Faith didn’t go in now, he would, and then Spike, and Willow, and Oz, and Eric, and none of them had a better chance at ending it than she did. She nodded once to Faith, lifted the Scythe, and smashed the blade into the final door.

It took a dozen more swings before the wall gave way under the barrage. Buffy steeled herself, having no idea what she would find beyond, and then kicked the remains of the door down and stepped onto it.

Behind her, Faith breathed an exclamation of utter fear. Buffy heard herself making a similar sound. Aside from the wall she had just destroyed, there were no visible borders to the space in front of her, just morbid smears of shifting color like a dark fog. At her feet, a walkway extended, fitted with sturdy rails on each side but supported by nothing. Instead of leading anywhere, it curled into itself, completing the path of golden spiral with Nina waiting at the center.

The Sunnydale Hellmouth had been frightening, but most of the time, it simply looked like a library. This one looked like Hell. Buffy tried to forbid herself from thinking about what would happen to someone who fell from this walkway, but it was too late.

“You got this,” Faith murmured. “I’ll shout at you if you’re acting weird.” Buffy nodded, and took the first step.

As she got closer to Nina, she could see that her arms were crossed and her head slightly tilted, looking bored. Her voice carried easily across the space. “I thought it would be Angel.”

“You’re not getting Angel,” Buffy proclaimed, tightening her grip on the Scythe. “Make do with me.”

Nina’s eyes narrowed. “I already have Angel, you stupid girl. I’ve had him since he climbed out of his grave thirsting for blood. You of all people should know that there’s no saving a vampire. If you decide to damn yourself I’m not getting you instead, I’m getting you too.”

Buffy kept walking, slow and steady. If Faith was still behind her, she was too close to see around the curve without looking back, which was not currently an attractive option. “Okay,” she replied to Nina. “Nice to have someone who wants to keep us together, for a change.” 

“You know he was still in love with you while I was screwing him? The scumbag. But hey, at least I was getting laid on a regular basis, which is more than you can say. How many times have you seen his dick now? Still just the once?”

At first, the taunt made Buffy flush with all of the bitter memories it brought to the surface. But she was walking down a narrow bridge over a demonic abyss, confronting an eldritch horror in human form, and jabs at her sex life didn’t really compare. In fact, the futility of that kind of approach from the Wolf made her suspicious. “What is this?” she asked. “I have about a billion vulnerabilities for you to exploit, and you decide to go with the expired love triangle?”

Nina’s response was hard, but not loud. “Maybe I just never got over it.”

It was surreal to see her there at the center of the deadly spiral, standing unarmed in her fashionable outfit and childish pout. For a moment, Buffy wondered if she really did see her as a romantic rival, but then it came clear. Angel had nothing to do with this. Flaunting her power and boasting about her plans for world domination would be expected of the Wolf, but wallowing in jealousy was unmistakably human, and that was the side that she wanted Buffy to see.

Buffy advanced another few steps. There was just one coil of the path between her and Nina now. “I guess you think I won’t kill a human,” she said, trying to make it sound threatening.

Nina smiled sweetly. “I’d stake my life on it.”

It was time to stop talking and make her move. She had her weapon ready, she knew exactly what to do, and the clock was ticking. Back in the club, the next victim might be subject to compulsion already. _Angel wouldn’t hesitate,_ Buffy told herself, moving around the next tight curve. _Angel was ready to get this done just to spare the rest of us._ And now she knew: that was why Angel had been buried in despair for as long as she had known him.

The walkway had turned her around so that she was now facing the smashed door that she had gone through to get here, though it seemed to be hovering in the borderless space and impossibly distant. Faith was nowhere in sight, but the very second that her eyes took that in, a giant werewolf burst onto the path and came galloping toward her. She couldn’t tell which one it was until a second one came behind it, and the comparison of their colors showed that Howell was first and Wolfe close behind. 

There was no way that she would get past anyone on this narrow lane, let alone a pair of raging monsters. Even if she defeated Nina, she would be forced to kill two men, victims of the Wolf as much as anyone else was, or die trying.

Howell stopped short when he was just a few paces away from her, blocking Wolfe from coming any farther either. Nina kissed the air in their direction and then raised her eyebrow at Buffy. “So what are we waiting for?”

Buffy couldn’t say so, but she was waiting for a fight. Anything would do: a slap to the face, a menacing chant, a werewolf attack -- all she wanted was some danger to justify striking back. But it was never going to happen. Nina was best served by inertia, and she already had her final three victims lined up on the spiral.

_"Buffy!”_ The shout had come from the door, and it was Angel’s voice, full of panic. She looked up and saw that he was already coming down the path, and Willow was following. Two more sacrifices for the Wolf.

Without another second of thought she raised the Scythe and plunged the blade into Nina’s heart. The woman made only the smallest gasp as she fell, but Buffy thought she saw her expression flitter through surprise and then a secretive kind of pleasure. She didn’t transform. The Hellmouth didn’t collapse around them. She died as a human dies.

Howell threw his head back and wailed in infinite suffering. Buffy wrenched the Scythe from Nina’s chest and brandished it at him, but he had turned away from her and was attacking Wolfe with wild abandon. Both nearly managed to toss the other over the edge before finally Wolfe cut and ran, causing Angel and Willow to turn back and dash to get out of his way. Howell was in hot pursuit, and the path was cleared for Buffy.

Everyone in front of her had to get through the door before she could, but as soon as her foot cleared the opening, Angel reached out from inside Satellite 1 and grabbed her hand, pulling her onto the solid floor of the club. She let the Scythe slip from her grasp and returned his firm embrace. “Angel, I killed her.”

“It’s gonna be okay,” he assured her, then gave her a gentle nudge to steer her through the next door. “Come on, we have to--”

“Got him!” cried Willow, and Buffy needed no further urging to pick up her weapon again and run to find out what was going on. Back in Satellite 2, she saw Willow immediately, working a magical net over a snarling mass of dark fur. Spike was there too, and Faith, and a lot of werewolves. Frantically, Buffy tried to think about who was missing.

There was a commotion on the other side of the bar, and she recognized Howell struggling against two ordinary-sized werewolves. “Don’t kill him!” she cried out. “He saved me!”

One of the wolves of the pack did seem to hear her; he or she came scurrying out and attacked Wolfe through the net instead. Another joined in, and before Buffy could react to anything that was happening, one had gone for his throat and he was caught in his death throes and reverting to human form. A bloody, naked, middle-aged man lay prone beneath the limp net.

The wolf who had dispatched him stood up on two legs and looked Buffy squarely in the eye, then turned into Eric, likewise naked and making no attempt to hide it. He reeled a little and put one hand on the bar to steady himself, wiping blood from his mouth with the other. “Where...where is...”

Involuntarily, Buffy looked at the Scythe in her hand, its red metal blade still smeared with Nina’s red blood. She didn’t say anything, but Eric fixed her with the coldest look of utter betrayal she had ever seen. His lips moved silently for a moment before he managed to speak out loud: “You said you would help her.”

“Buffy!” Angel called, and she turned, ashamed at her helplessness and her need to get away from Eric. Angel was kneeling behind the bar, out of sight, and she joined him to find that Willow was there too, and that Howell was human. Like Wolfe, he was terribly wounded, but he was sentient, and someone had thrown a jacket over him to hide his nudity. 

Buffy felt a sob coming on. “I’m so sorry,” she said to him. “We said we would help you too. And now…Willow, can you heal him?”

Willow was shaking her head. Howell’s gaze was unfocused and far away, but he didn’t seem interested in the question concerning his survival. “Need…” he rasped.

“Yes?” Buffy took his hand in both of hers. “What do you need?”

“Paper,” he finished. “Write.”

Angel found a stack of flyers that had been stacked on the bar, and Willow fished a pen out of the cash register. As Angel helped Howell steady his hand to scrawl his message onto the back of the neon green sheet of paper, Buffy stood up to survey the room.

All of the wolves had returned to their human forms, and most were tending quietly to their wounded. It wasn’t immediately apparent if there had been any other deaths. The room, of course, was in shambles, with glassware shattered and strewn everywhere, and no piece of furniture left upright. Spike was speaking rapidly with Jordan but holding tightly to Faith, who looked like she could barely stand. When she saw Buffy looking her way, she tugged Spike’s sleeve and made him walk her over to the bar.

“We gotta motor, B,” she said in a low tone of warning. “Close to now as you can get.”

“No, I...” Buffy scrubbed at her face and tried to explain. “Howell.”

Angel’s voice floated up to her. “He’s gone.” She whirled around, and Angel got to his feet. “There’s nothing else we can do. Faith is right. These people are going to turn on us as soon as they get their bearings.”

“We locked up the door best we could but it won’t keep them out,” Spike added. “Only so long before someone braves it and finds the body.”

The memory of killing Nina flashed violently through Buffy’s mind. With one tortured glance back at Howell, she nodded and let Angel lead her down the stairs as discreetly as possible. They passed the chalk mark for the 8:09 sacrifice, making Buffy suddenly remember Ken Godfrey. Someone must have moved his body, but his wife and son had been there to see him die when it happened.

She and Angel made it outside first. The taste of the crisp night air made her realize how long she had spent in the building, but the brief interlude in the Hellmouth had been so much worse. This must be what a prison break felt like.

 _No,_ she corrected herself. _This is what it feels like to take a life and escape justice._

//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Oz took an aspirin in the kitchen and then remained there for a minute, gathering up the strength he needed to face his visitors. He had only been awake for two hours, and he wasn’t sure how bad his injuries had been before Willow healed him. The last thing he remembered from last night was Nina flinging him to the side before marching into Satellite 3 with Wolfe and Howell.

Buffy and Angel said they had found him lying prone on the sidewalk when they left the club. They were anxious to know why there hadn’t been any officers waiting out there, or indeed anyone at all, when they knew that the scene had been monitored since at least the point when Faith had entered. Oz had only a hazy memory of Nina commanding everyone to leave, but Buffy accepted it as the sole plausible explanation.

What he really wanted to know was why he was alive. It made some sense that Nina wouldn’t send him away with the cops -- he knew her better than they did, and that might affect her suggestive powers -- but leaving him unconscious by the road just seemed sloppy.

Willow stepped furtively into the kitchen, and without hesitation he told her what he had been thinking. Her eyebrows came up in a sad tilt. “Don’t mention it to Buffy and Angel,” she whispered. “It’s so hard for them already, and if they think that enough of Nina was left in the Wolf that she spared your life on purpose…”

“Don’t mention it?” he echoed softly. “Willow, can’t you see how we got here?”

She dropped her gaze the floor, cheeks burning, and he reached out to pull her into a hug. “I’m sorry. It’s as much my fault as anyone’s. I won’t say anything.”

“It was the Wolf,” she insisted, dropping her face into his chest without resistance. “None of us would have acted the way we had if we weren’t being influenced.”

Oz stroked her hair, but had nothing to say that could comfort her. At the time, it had seemed best to plan for her arrival without informing Buffy; to place all of their hopes on the spell she had said herself was a long shot; to send Eric and the pack into Satellite 3 for Nina’s protection. Had it really been the Wolf making those choices for him? He didn’t think he would ever know for sure.

They returned to the living room together. Buffy and Angel were on the couch, Faith was on the chair, and Spike was standing next to her. Everyone looked up, which just emphasized the fact that they clearly had not been speaking amongst themselves. Nobody seemed to want to start now, either.

“I’m packed up,” said Angel, closing up the silence before it stretched too far. “We’ll leave at sunset.”

“You can swing by my place to pick up Buffy’s stuff,” said Faith, and he nodded in acknowledgement.

Oz surprised himself by saying, “Sooner would be better if you can cut it.” It drew a mixture of reproachful glares and hurt expressions, but he didn’t apologize. “Eric isn’t an empty threat kind of guy. He’ll be actively hunting you, and most of the pack will back him up. You need to get out of here.”

“What about us?” Spike wanted to know. “Lehane ‘n me. Werewolf vendetta, or no?”

“I don’t know,” said Oz, exasperated. “Did you kill anyone?” They all seemed to expect him to speak for the entire pack, but he hadn’t even witnessed most of what had gone down at the end. He only knew how they felt inasmuch as he knew it wasn’t far from what he was feeling himself.

Faith spoke up, her voice tired but unwavering. “We’re staying, Spike. We have work to do.”

“I thought maybe I would stay too?” Willow sounded timid, a far cry from the powerful spellcaster she had become. “I can help. No one’s mad at me, they saw me healing them.” She shot a hopeful glance at Oz, and he felt a rush of gratitude. His high school sweetheart was still in there after all. 

It was time someone asked Buffy and Angel, so Oz took it upon himself: “Where are you going? Back to LA?”

They looked at each other before Buffy shook her head and Angel took a folded piece of green paper from his pocket and handed it to Oz. “Howell wrote this down before he died. You know how he was keyed into the Wolf’s plans. I think this was all he could do to give us a head start.”

Oz unfolded the slip of paper; it was an advertisement for a local band called Lobo, but he flipped it over and saw the handwritten note that Angel was referring to. It was just a few letters, scrawled out large with a lot of pressure:

**OH → NY  
RAM**

He passed it to Willow and asked Angel, “You’re thinking he’s telling you where to find the next fight?”

“The Ram,” Angel agreed. “OH means Ohio, where we are now, so we’re headed to New York.”

“We have a Slayer office there,” said Buffy. “Dawn and Xander will be glad to see us. Unless one of them turns out to be infected by the Ram and I have to kill them too.” She said it almost like a joke, making Oz flinch, but he knew enough to recognize it as a sign of her misery. Buffy had told him about her execution of Nina immediately when they saw each other, and she seemed like she was still waiting for someone to punish her for it.

Instead, they all looked at her with sympathy, and Spike said, “You saved the world again, Slayer. No matter what else happened, that was a good day’s work.”

Buffy stood up abruptly, jerking her arm away from Angel’s hand. “I need to go get a thing not in here,” she said, and hurried into Oz’s guest bedroom.

“Someone had to do it,” said Faith into the following silence. “She knows that, right?”

Angel leaned forward, shoulders drooping. “You said yourself there would be magical consequences on the one who did. I thought it would be me.” He shook his head. “But I thought if it was her, that somehow, she would find another option. That’s what she’s always done. Quick thinking at the eleventh hour, and she takes it all on herself and saves everyone. If I hadn’t believed that, maybe I would have gotten there first. Now she’s paid a higher price than any of us.”

“Tell that to my uncle,” Oz replied, more sharply than he had intended. Angel wasn’t exaggerating about the harm this must have done to Buffy, but none of them had the luxury of moping over it. Uncle Ken had been teaching his son how to sail, and had invited Oz to join them nearly every weekend. He shouldn’t have come to the club last night, and deciding whose fault it was that he had wasn’t going to bring him back.

Oz felt Willow’s hand on his shoulder, steady and warm. She would help him rebuild, he knew. She would stay in Cleveland for as long as he needed her. Someday she might even kiss him again.

“Angel.” Faith was looking across the room at him with old eyes. “I was there. I watched her go down the spiral. I even heard what she said to Nina -- to the Wolf -- until I had to leave to come get you. They talked about you. Buffy knew what she was doing. She didn’t want you to be there in her place. Um…” She stumbled and shook her head to clear it. “All I’m trying to say is, she understands you better now. I think we all do.”

Willow was nodding. Even Spike cast a sorrowful look toward Angel, then quickly dropped his gaze. Oz made a sound of agreement deep in his throat: it was hard to be strong, and he was here now with the strongest people he knew.

The Wolf was dead. The wolves would howl for her, every full moon, for years to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. Questions, comments, complaints always welcomed. 'Til next time, Buffy fandom.


End file.
